into a flagged area, and killed it on the spot. He remained at his window screaming in agonies of grief. The neighbours flocked to the house, took up the child, and delivered it dead to the unhappy father, who wept bitterly, and filled the street with lamentations. He lost his senses, and from that moment never recovered his understanding. As he had a sufficient fortune, his friends chose to let him remain in his house, under two keepers appointed by Dr. Monro. Garrick frequently went to see his distracted friend, who passed the remainder of his life in going to the window, and there playing in fancy with his child. After some dalliance, he dropped it, and, bursting into a flood of tears, filled the house with shrieks of grief and bitter anguish. He then sat down, in a pensive mood, his eyes fixed on one object, at times looking slowly round him, as as if to implore compassion. Garrick was often present at this scene of misery, and was ever after used to say, that it that it gave him the first idea of King Lear's madness. This writer has often seen him rise in company to give a representation of this unfortunate father. He leaned on the back of a chair, seeming with parental fondness to play with a child, and, after expressing the most heart-felt delight, he suddenly dropped the infant, and instantly broke out in a most violent agony of grief, so tender, so affecting, and pathetic, that every eye in company was moistened with a gush of tears. There it was, said Garrick, that I learned to imitate madness; I copied nature, and to that owed my success in King Lear. It is wonderful to tell that he descended from that first character in tragedy, to the part of Abel Drugger; he represented the tobacco boy boy in the truest comic stile: no grimace, no starting, no wild geticulation. He seemed to be a new man. Hogarth, the famous painter, saw him in Richard III. and on the following night in Abel Drugger: he was so struck, that he said to Garrick, "You are in your element, "when you are begrimed with dirt, or up "to your elbows in blood." THE managers of Drury-Lane, and CoventGarden played to thin houses, while Garrick drew the town after him; and the actors beheld his prodigious success with an evil eye. Quin, in his sarcastic vein, said, "This is the wonder of a day; Garrick is a new religion; the 16 people follow him as another Whitfield, "but they will soon return to church again." The joke was relished, and soon spread through, the the town. Garrick thought it required an an swer: he replied in the following Epigram: POPE QUIN, who damns all Churches but his own, Complains that Heresy infests the town; That WHITFIELD GARRICK has misled the age, He says, that Schism has turn'd the Nation's brain, Thy Bulls and Erors are rever'd no more. QUIN was now, like his own Falstaff, not only witty in himself, but the cause of wit in others. The lines contain more truth than is generally found in Epigrams. Garrick's stile of acting was universally acknowledged to be a reformation. He was the undoubted master of the sock and buskin. He aspired also to the |