[Footnote A:  Secretary Craggs.]

“To conclude, their dispute was ended the next morning in Hyde Park, where the determin’d combatant who first ask’d for satisfaction was obliged afterwards to ask his life too; whether he mended it or not, I have not yet heard; but his antagonist in a few years afterwards died in one of the principal posts of the Government.”

There were no more such scenes after Santlow became Mrs. Barton Booth.  Everything was respectability, and the voice of the turtle-dove appears to have been heard in the home of the happy couple.  Yea, the husband waxed ecstatic after several years of married bliss, once more tuned his lyre, and burst forth into verses, wherein he set forth, among other things: 

  “Happy the hour when first our souls were joined! 
  The social virtues and the cheerful mind
  Have ever crowned our days, beguiled our pain;
  Strangers to discord and her clamorous train,” &c.

The lines suggest placidity of existence, and placid, indeed, was the married life of Booth, barring his moments of ill-health.  When his career is compared to that of certain other players, it stands out in rather pleasant relief, by virtue of its even tenor and prosperity.  It was free from the vicissitudes which have waylaid the paths of equally great artists, and the current of his genius ran on without a ripple, save that of sickness.  There was one direction, however, wherein Booth found variety and excitement, and that was in the wondrous diversity of parts which he assumed.  In tragedy, his work took a wide range, going all the way from Laertes to Othello, while he sallied forth now and again into the field of comedy, and emerged therefrom with honour.  He did not, to be sure, distinguish himself so brilliantly as a comedian as he did in tragic garb, yet he wooed Thalia in a genteel way which seldom failed to please.  Nay, it is chronicled that he impersonated capon-lined Falstaff in a fashion that amused even phlegmatic Queen Anne.  But the actor of long ago thought nothing of such catholicity in art.  He often worked like a horse, that he might later play like a god.[A]

[Footnote A:  To show the versatility of Booth it need only be mentioned that his parts (among many not herein named) included the Ghost, Laertes, Horatio and the Prince in “Hamlet,” Dick in “The Confederacy,” Captain Worthy in the “Fair Quaker of Deal,” Pyrrhus, Cato, Young Bevil in the “Conscious Lovers,” Tamerlane, Oronooko, Jaffier, Othello, King Lear, Hotspur, Wildair, Sir Charles Easy, Falstaff, Cassio, Macbeth, Banquo, Lennox, Henry VIII. and Cinna.  Few living players can match such a repertoire.]