I am justly humiliated, as you see;" and she began
to cry a little.
"This is very painful," said Cibber.
Mrs. Bracegirdle now raised her eyes (they had set her in a chair), and
looking sweetly, tenderly and earnestly on her old companion, she said to
him, slowly, gently, but impressively "Colley, at threescore years and
ten this was ill done of us! You and I are here now--for what? to cheer
the young up the hill we mounted years ago. And, old friend, if we
detract from them we discourage them. A great sin in the old!"
"Every dog his day."
"We have had ours." Here she smiled, then, laying her hand tenderly in
the old man's, she added, with calm solemnity: "And now we must go
quietly toward our rest, and strut and fret no more the few last minutes
of life's fleeting hour."
How tame my cacotype of these words compared with what they were. I am
ashamed of them and myself, and the human craft of writing, which, though
commoner far, is so miserably behind the godlike art of speech: _"Si
ipsam audivisses!"_
These ink scratches, which, in the imperfection of language, we have
called words, till the unthinking actually dream they are words, but
which are the shadows of the corpses of words; these word-shadows then
were living powers on her lips, and subdued, as eloquence always does,
every heart within reach of the imperial tongue.
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