The lines of Lady Betty must have fairly sizzled with the fire of comedy as they fell from the pretty lips of Oldfield.  No wonder that Londoners thought the character bewitching; no wonder that Cibber wrote so enthusiastically of the actress in that wonderful Apology.  “Had her birth plac’d her in a higher rank of life,” he notes, perhaps forgetting that her very descent entitled the poor sewing-girl to a position which poverty denied her, “she had certainly appear’d in reality what in this play she only excellently acted, an agreeably gay woman of quality a little too conscious of her natural attractions.  I have often seen her in private societies where women of the best rank might have borr’d some part of her behaviour without the least diminution of their sense or dignity.  And this very morning, when I am now writing at the Bath, November 11, 1738, the same words were said of her by a lady of condition, whose better judgment of her personal merit in that light has embolden’d me to repeat them.”

The best of us have a wee bit of snobbishness buried deep in the inmost recesses of our souls, and Colley, who was neither the best nor the worst of humanity, had this quality well developed.  To see that one has but to read the above quotation between the lines.  He loved a lord as ardently as did the next man, and he attached to rank the same exaggerated importance which pervades, with all the unwelcome odour of sickening incense, the literature of his age.  As Macklin so well said of him, Nature formed Cibber for a coxcomb, and it is quite probable that he took greater delight in being thought a leader of fashion than a writer of charming plays.  Indeed, he was careful to cultivate the society of young noblemen, and this he was able to do by virtue of his theatrical successes, and, more helpful still, by a levity of character which stuck to him despite his great earnestness in many directions.  Perhaps his frivolity and his love of pleasure, including the delights of the gaming table, may have been half assumed; perhaps he was only playing one of his many parts.  He certainly succeeded in the role; he enlivened the dissipations of many a beau by his quaint conceits and flashes of humour, and went on his way rejoicing that he could be the boon companion of twenty idle lords.[A]

[Footnote A:  Colley Cibber, one of the earliest of the dramatic autobiographers, is also one of the most amusing.  He flourished in wig and embroidery, player, poet, and manager, during the Augustan age of Queen Anne, somewhat earlier and somewhat later.  A most egregious fop, according to all accounts, he was, but a very pleasant one notwithstanding, as your fop of parts is apt to be.  Pope gained but little in the warfare he waged with him, for this plain reason—­that the great poet accuses his adversary of dullness, which was not by any means one of his sins, instead of selecting one of the numerous faults, such as pertness, petulance, and presumption, of which he was really guilty.—­M.R.  Mitford.]