_ As Mrs. Day (committee) she painted
wrinkles on her lovely face so honestly that she was taken for
threescore, and she carried out the design with voice and person, and did
a vulgar old woman to the life. She disfigured her own beauties to show
the beauty of her art; in a word, she was an artist! It does not follow
she was the greatest artist that ever breathed; far from it. Mr. Vane was
carried to this notion by passion and ignorance.
On the evening of our tale he was at his post patiently sitting out one
of those sanguinary discourses our rude forefathers thought were tragic
plays. _Sedet aeternumque Sedebit Infelix Theseus,_ because Mrs.
Woffington is to speak the epilogue.
These epilogues were curiosities of the human mind; they whom, just to
ourselves and _them,_ we call our _forbears, _ had an idea their blood
and bombast were not ridiculous enough in themselves, so when the curtain
had fallen on the _debris_ of the _dramatis personae,_ and of common
sense, they sent on an actress to turn all the sentiment so laboriously
acquired into a jest.
To insist that nothing good or beautiful shall be carried safe from a
play out into the street was the bigotry of English horseplay. Was a
Lucretia the heroine of the tragedy, she was careful in the epilogue to
speak like Messalina. Did a king's mistress come to hunger and
repentance, she disinfected all the _petites maitresses_ in the house of
the moral, by assuring them that sin is a joke, repentance a greater, and
that she individually was ready for either if they would but cry, laugh
and pay.
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