“But, I remember,” laconically adds Chetwood, “few people came to ask the reason.  However, I fear this disappointment hasten’d his death; for he survived it but three days; dying in the 44th year of his age, a martyr to what often stole from him a good understanding.”

  “He who delights in drinking out of season,
  Takes wond’rous pains to drown his manly reason.”

Poor Walker!  He is not the only actor who has perished from a mixture of wine and injured vanity.

To return to the success of the “Non-juror,” Cibber writes:  “All the reason I had to think it no bad performance was, that it was acted eighteen days running, and that the party that were hurt by it (as I have been told) have not been the smallest number of my back friends ever since.  But happy was it for this play that the very subject was its protection; a few smiles of silent contempt were the utmost disgrace that on the first day of its appearance it was thought safe to throw upon it; as the satire was chiefly employ’d on the enemies of the Government, they were not so hardy as to own themselves such by any higher disapprobation or resentment."[A]

[Footnote A:  The production of the “Non-juror” added Pope to the list of Cibber’s enemies, the great poet’s father having been a Non-juror.]

Yet Cibber’s enemies never failed to make things unpleasant for him if they could do so without running too great a risk.  There was Nathaniel Mist, for instance, who published a Jacobite paper called Mist’s Weekly Journal.  This vindictive gentleman, whose political heresies once brought him to the pillory and a prison, began a systematic attack upon the actor-manager, and kept up the warfare for fifteen years.  Once, when Colley was ill of a fever, Mist made up his journalistic mind that his enemy must have the good taste to depart the pleasures of this life.  So he inserted the following paragraph in his paper: 

“Yesterday died Mr. Colley Cibber, late Comedian of the Theatre Royal, notorious for writing the ‘Non-juror.’”

The very day that this obituary appeared Cibber crawled out of the house, sick-faced but convalescent, and read the notice with keen interest.  Whether he was amused thereat, or dubbed the joke a poor one, is a matter which he does not record, but he tells us that he “saw no use in being thought to be thoroughly dead before his time,” and “therefore had a mind to see whether the town cared to have him alive again.”

“So the play of the ‘Orphan’ being to be acted that day, I quietly stole myself into the part of the Chaplain, which I had not been seen in for many years before.  The surprise of the audience at my unexpected appearance on the very day I had been dead in the news, and the paleness of my looks, seem’d to make it a doubt whether I was not the ghost of my real self departed.  But when I spoke, their wonder eas’d itself by an applause; which convinc’d me they were then satisfied that my friend Mist had told a fib of me.  Now, if simply to have shown myself in broad life, and about my business, after he had notoriously reported me dead, can be called a reply, it was the only one which his paper while alive ever drew from me.”