In person, Garrick was a little below middle height; in his later years he seems to have inclined to stoutness. The extraordinary mobility of his whole person, and his power of as it were transforming himself at will, are attested by many anecdotes and descriptions, but the piercing power of his eye must have been his most irresistible feature.
Johnson, of whose various and often merely churlish remarks on Garrick and his doings many are scattered through the pages of Boswell, spoke warmly of the elegance and sprightliness of his friend’s conversation, as well as of his liberality and kindness of heart; while to the great actor’s art he paid the exquisite tribute of describing Garrick’s sudden death as having “eclipsed the gaiety of nations, and impoverished the public stock of harmless pleasure.” But the most discriminating character of Garrick, slightly tinged with satire, is that drawn by Goldsmith in his poem of Retaliation. Beyond a doubt he was not without a certain moral timidity contrasting strangely with his eager temperament and alertness of intellect; but, though he was not cast in a heroic mould, he must have been one of the most amiable of men. Garrick was often happy in his epigrams and occasional verse, including his numerous prologues and epilogues. He had the good taste to recognize, and the spirit to make public his recognition of, the excellence of Gray’s odes at a time when they were either ridiculed or neglected. His dramatic pieces, The Lying Valet, adapted from Motteux’s Novelty Lethe (1740), The Guardian, Linco’s Travels (1767), Miss in her Teens (1747), Irish Widow, &c., and his alterations and adaptations of old plays, which together fill four volumes, evinced his knowledge of stage effect and his appreciation of lively dialogue and action; but he cannot be said to have added one new or original character to the drama. He was joint author with Colman of The Clandestine Marriage (1766), in which he is said to have written his famous part of Lord Ogleby. The excellent farce, High Life below Stairs, appears to have been wrongly attributed to Garrick, and to be by James Townley. His Dramatic Works (1798) fill three, his Poetic (1735) two volumes.
Garrick’s Private Correspondence (published in 1831-1832 with a short memoir by Boaden, in 2 vols. 4to), which includes his extensive Foreign Correspondence with distinguished French men and women, and the notices of him in the memoirs of Cumberland, Hannah More and Madame D’Arblay, and above all in Boswell’s Life of Johnson, bear testimony to his many attractive qualities as a companion and to his fidelity as a friend.
Bibliography.—A collection of unprinted Garrick letters is in the Forster library at South Kensington. A list of publications of all kinds for and against Garrick will be found in R. Lowe’s Bibliographical History of English Theatrical Literature (1887). The earlier biographies of Garrick are by Arthur Murphy (2 vols., 1801) and by the bookseller Tom Davies (2 vols., 4th ed., 1805), the latter a work of some merit, but occasionally inaccurate and confused as to dates; and a searching if not altogether sympathetic survey of his verses is furnished by Joseph Knight’s valuable Life (1894). A memoir of Garrick is included in a volume of French Memoirs of Mlle Clairon and others, published by Levain (H.L. Cain) at Paris in 1846; and an Italian Biografia di Davide Garrick was published by C. Blasis at Milan in 1840. Mr Percy Fitzgerald’s Life (2 vols., 1868; new edition, 1899) is full and spirited, and has been reprinted, with additions, among Sir Theodore Martin’s Monographs (1906). A delightful essay on Garrick appeared in the Quarterly Review (July 1868), directing attention to the admirable criticisms of Garrick’s acting in 1775 in the letters of G.C. Lichtenberg (Verm. Schriften, iii., Göttingen, 1801). See also for a very valuable survey of Garrick’s labours as an actor, with a bibliography, C. Gaehde, David Garrick als Shakespeare-Darsteller, &c. (Berlin, 1904). Mrs Parsons’ Garrick, and his Circle and Some unpublished Correspondence of David Garrick, ed. G.P. Baker (Boston, Mass., 1907), are interesting additions to the literature of the subject. There is also a Life by James Smyth, David Garrick (1887). T.W. Robertson’s play David Garrick, first acted by Sothern, and later associated with Sir Charles Wyndham, is of course mere fiction.
As to the portraits of Garrick, see W.T. Lawrence in The Connoisseur (April 1905). That by Gainsborough at Stratford-on-Avon was preferred by Mrs Garrick to all others. Several remain from the hand of Hogarth, including the famous picture of Garrick as Richard III. The portraits by Reynolds include the celebrated “Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy.” Zoffany’s are portraits in character. Roubiliac’s statue of Shakespeare, for which Garrick sat, and for which he paid the sculptor three hundred guineas, was originally placed in a small temple at Hampton, and is now in the entrance hall at the British Museum.
(R. Ca.; A. W. W.)
[1] In the subsequent Apology addressed to the Critical Reviewers, Churchill revenged himself for the slight which he supposed Garrick to have put upon him, by some spiteful lines, which, however, Garrick requited by good-humoured kindness.
GARRISON, WILLIAM LLOYD (1805-1879), the American anti-slavery leader, was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, U.S.A., on the 10th of December 1805. His parents were from the British province of New Brunswick. The father, Abijah, a sea-captain, went away from home when William was a child, and it is not known whether he died at sea or on land. The mother, whose maiden name was Lloyd, is said to have been a woman of high character, charming in person and eminent for piety. She died in 1823. William had a taste for books, and made the most of his limited opportunities. His mother first set him to learn the trade of a shoemaker, first at Newburyport, and then, after 1815, at Baltimore, Maryland, and, when she found that this did not suit him, let him try his hand at cabinet-making (at Haverhill, Mass.). But this pleased him no better. In October 1818, when he was in his fourteenth year, he was made more than content by being indentured to Ephraim W. Allen, proprietor of the Newburyport Herald, to learn the trade of a printer. He soon became an expert compositor, and after a time began to write anonymously for the Herald. His communications won the commendation of the editor, who had not at first the slightest suspicion that he was the author. He also wrote for other papers with equal success. A series of political essays, written by him for the Salem Gazette, was copied by a prominent Philadelphia journal, the editor of which attributed them to the Hon. Timothy Pickering, a distinguished statesman of Massachusetts. His skill as a printer won for him the position of foreman, while his ability as a writer was so marked that the editor of the Herald, when temporarily called away from his post, left the paper in his charge.