Not long before she died I had been discoursing with her on the quantity of real present emotion which a great tragic performer experiences during acting.  I ventured to think, that though in the first instance such players must have possessed the feelings which they so powerfully called up in others, yet by frequent repetition those feelings must become deadened in great measure, and the performer trust to the memory of past emotion, rather than express a present one.  She indignantly repelled the notion, that with a truly great tragedian the operation, by which such effects were produced upon an audience, could ever degrade itself into what was purely mechanical.  With much delicacy, avoiding to instance in her self-experience, she told me, that so long ago as when she used to play the part of the Little Son to Mrs. Porter’s Isabella, (I think it was) when that impressive actress has been bending over her in some heart-rending colloquy, she has felt real hot tears come trickling from her, which (to use her powerful expression) have perfectly scalded her back.

I am not quite so sure that it was Mrs. Porter; but it was some great actress of that day.  The name is indifferent; but the fact of the scalding tears I most distinctly remember.

I was always fond of the society of players, and am not sure that an impediment in my speech (which certainly kept me out of the pulpit) even more than certain personal disqualifications, which are often got over in that profession, did not prevent me at one time of life from adopting it.  I have had the honour (I must ever call it) once to have been admitted to the tea-table of Miss Kelly.  I have played at serious whist with Mr. Listen.  I have chatted with ever good-humoured Mrs. Charles Kemble.  I have conversed as friend to friend with her accomplished husband.  I have been indulged with a classical conference with Macready; and with a sight of the Player-picture gallery, at Mr. Matthews’s, when the kind owner, to remunerate me for my love of the old actors (whom he loves so much) went over it with me, supplying to his capital collection, what alone the artist could not give them—­voice; and their living motion.  Old tones, half-faded, of Dodd and Parsons, and Baddeley, have lived again for me at his bidding.  Only Edwin he could not restore to me.  I have supped with ——­; but I am growing a coxcomb.

As I was about to say—­at the desk of the then treasurer of the old Bath theatre—­not Diamond’s—­presented herself the little Barbara S——.

The parents of Barbara had been in reputable circumstances.  The father had practised, I believe, as an apothecary in the town.  But his practice from causes which I feel my own infirmity too sensibly that way to arraign—­or perhaps from that pure infelicity which accompanies some people in their walk through life, and which it is impossible to lay at the door of imprudence—­was now reduced to nothing.  They were in fact in the very teeth of starvation, when the manager, who knew and respected them in better days, took the little Barbara into his company.