Now Mr. Vane had as much to say as either of them, but he had not the
habit, which dramatic folks have, of carrying his whole bank in his
cheek-pocket, so they quenched him for two minutes.
But lovers are not silenced, he soon returned to the attack; he dwelt on
the grace, the ease, the freshness, the intelligence, the universal
beauty of Mrs. Woffington. Pomander sneered, to draw him out. Cibber
smiled, with good-natured superiority. This nettled the young gentleman,
he fired up, his handsome countenance glowed, he turned Demosthenes for
her he loved. One advantage he had over both Cibber and Pomander, a fair
stock of classical learning; on this he now drew.
"Other actors and actresses," said he, "are monotonous in voice,
monotonous in action, but Mrs. Woffington's delivery has the compass and
variety of nature, and her movements are free from the stale uniformity
that distinguishes artifice from art. The others seem to me to have but
two dreams of grace, a sort of crawling on stilts is their motion, and an
angular stiffness their repose." He then cited the most famous statues of
antiquity, and quoted situations in plays where, by her fine dramatic
instinct, Mrs. Woffington, he said, threw her person into postures
similar to these, and of equal beauty; not that she strikes attitudes
like the rest, but she melts from one beautiful statue into another; and,
if sculptors could gather from her immortal graces, painters, too, might
take from her face the beauties that belong of right to passion and
thought, and orators might revive their withered art, and learn from
those golden lips the music of old Athens, that quelled tempestuous mobs,
and princes drunk with victory.
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