mood, his eyes fixed on one object, at times looking slowly round him, as if to implore compassion. Garrick was often present at this scene of misery, and was ever after used to say, that it gave him the first idea of King Lear's madness."

ness.

The great actor was extremely sensitive. SensitiveHis great sensibility made him fear, defer to, and ever ready to conciliate the public. "When he first acted Macbeth," Davies tells us, "he was so alarmed with the fears of critical examination, that during his preparation for the character, he devoted some part of the time to the writing of a humorous pamphlet upon the subject. He knew that his manner of representing Macbeth would be essentially different from that of all the actors who had played it for twenty or thirty years before, and he was therefore determined to attack himself ironically, to blunt, if not to prevent, the remarks of others. This pamphlet was A curious called 'An Essay on Acting; in which will be considered the mimical Behavior of a certain fashionable faulty Actor, and the Laudableness of such unmanly, as well as inhuman Proceedings; to which will be added, A Short Criticism on his acting Macbeth.' It had this motto on the

pamphlet.

title-page: Macbeth has murdered Garrick.'"

His extreme sensibility was not inconStage feel- sistent with his stage feeling. It is recorded of him, that whilst he was drowning

ing.

Foote and
Garrick.

the house in tears, in the fourth act of
Lear, he put his tongue in his cheek, and
said to King, during the applause, “D—n
me, Tom, it will do, it will do." It made
him painfully dread ridicule. On one occa-
sion, it is said, Quin went to the pit to see
his rival act. It was at a time when Ho-
garth's Marriage a la Mode was familiar to
every one.
One of the prints of that series
represents a negro boy bringing in the tea
things. When Garrick, with his diminu-
tive figure and blackened face, came for-
ward as Othello, Quin exclaimed, "Here is
Pompey, but where is the tray?" The
effect was electrical, and Garrick never
attempted Othello again.

Foote was gigantic, as Garrick was diminutive in stature. The former was audacious and aggressive in manner, the latter good-natured, vivacious, and deferential; but he could defend himself. We are told of how a project of Foote's to publicly ridicule Garrick fell through in a singular manner. The parties met, as if by acci

dent, at the house of a nobleman, the common friend of both; when alighting at the same time from their chariots at his lordship's door, and exchanging significant looks at each other, Garrick broke silence first by asking, "Is it war or peace?" War or "Oh! peace, by all means," replied Foote, with apparent good will, and the two spent the day amicably together.

peace?

Davies states that after Mr. Garrick had been abroad about a year and a half, satiated with the amusements and pleasures of the continent, he turned his thoughts towards his native country. But before he would set out for Calais, he was resolved to put in practice his usual method of preventing censure, and blunting the edge of ridicule, by anticipation. For this purpose, before he left Paris, he sat down very seriously to write a kind of satirical poem on himself; it was called The Sick Monkey, The Sick and the plan of it was, the talk or censure of other animals and reptiles on him and his travels, etc. This poem he sent from Paris to a friend, with a request that he would have it printed, to prepare for his reception in London. It attracted little attention, and died almost still-born.

He had intuitively perceived what was

Monkey.

The world

likes change.

ON GIVING
ADVICE.

soon to take place. The world likes change. The play-goers of London got tired even of Garrick. It is related as a fact, that one night the cash receipts of Drury Lane, though Garrick and Mrs. Cibber performed in the same play, amounted to no more than three pounds, fifteen shillings, and sixpence !

The wise do not need counsel, and fools will not take it, is one of the pregnant sentences of Seneca. And what, to say truth, is more difficult than counsel in the conduct of life? Right and wrong, says Manzoni, never are divided with so clean a cut, that one party has the whole of either. To give advice, as to do good, we must know how to do it; and, like everything else, we can only know this through the medium of our own passions, our own judgment, our own ideas; which not unfrequently are rather as correct as they are capable of being, than as they ought to be.

"When one has looked about him in the Goethe to world long enough," said Goethe to EckerEckermann. mann, "to see how the most judicious enterprises frequently fail, and the most absurd have the good fortune to succeed, he becomes disinclined to give any one

people.

advice. At bottom, he who asks advice shows himself limited; he who gives it gives also proof that he is presumptuous. If any one asks me for good advice, I say, I will give it, but only on condition that you will promise not to take it." "I have always hated to give advice," says Hawthorne, in the same strain, "especially when there is a prospect of its being taken. It is only one-eyed people who love to ad- One-eyed vise, or have any spontaneous promptitude of action. When a man opens both his eyes, he generally sees about as many reasons for acting in any one way as in any other, and quite as many for acting in neither; and is therefore likely to leave his friends to regulate their own conduct, and also to remain quiet as regards his especial affairs till necessity shall prick him onward. Nevertheless, the world and individuals flourish upon a constant suc- A succession cession of blunders." "Why do you so much admire the Helen of Zeuxis?" said Nicostratus. "You would not wonder why I so much admired it," replied the painter, "if you had my eyes." Once when Giotto, a friend of Dante, had been summoned to Naples by King Robert, and was executing some paintings for that sov

of blunders.