Nance Oldfield may have been almost mute for a twelvemonth, yet more than a few feminine novices, Anno Domino 1898, would never be content to remain silent; not only must they make a noise behind the footlights, but they feel it incumbent to be heard in the newspapers as well.  Any dramatic editor could tell a weary tale of the importunities of a progressive young lady who wants to enlighten an aching public at least six times a week as to the number of her dresses, the colour of her hair, and the attention of her admirers.  There is a blessed consolation in all this:  the female with the trousseau, the champagned locks and the notoriety lasts no longer than the butterfly, and her place is soon taken by the girl who never bothers about the paragraphs, because she is sure to get them.

To return to the more congenial subject of Oldfield, it is strange that so shrewd a Thespian as Cibber (who seems to have been clever in all things but poetry) was so long in coming to a real appreciation of her genius.  He is manly enough to confess that not even the silvery tone of that honeyed voice could, “’till after some time incline my ear to any hope in her favour.”  “But public approbation,” he tells us, “is the warm weather of a theatrical plant, which will soon bring it forward to whatever perfection nature has design’d it.  However, Mrs. Oldfield (perhaps for want of fresh parts) seem’d to come but slowly forward ’till the year 1703.”  So slowly had she come forward indeed, that in 1702, Gildon, a now forgotten critic and dramatist, included her among the “meer Rubbish that ought to be swept off the stage with the Filth and Dust."[A] Time has avenged the actress for this slight; who, excepting the student of theatrical history, remembers Gildon?

[Footnote A:  From the “Comparison Between the Two Stages.”]

What is more to the purpose, Nance was able to avenge herself in the flesh, only a few months after these contemptuous lines had been penned.  It happened at Bath, in the summer of 1703, and the story of her triumph, brief as it is, sounds quaint and pretty, as it comes down to us laden with a thousand suggestions of fashionable life in the reign of Queen Anne—­a life made up of gossip and cards, drinking, gaming, patches and powder, fine clothes, full perriwigs and empty heads.  What a picturesque lot of people there must have been at the great English spa that season, all anxious to get a glimpse of her plump majesty, who was staying there, and all willing enough to do anything except to test the waters or the baths from which the place first acquired fame.  They were all there, the pretty maids and wrinkled matrons, the young rakes of twenty, ready for a frolic, and the old rakes of thirty too weary to do much more than go to the theatre and cry out, “Damme, this is a damn’d play.”  Then the children, who were always in the way, and the aged fathers of families who liked to swear at the dandified airs and newly imported French manners of their sons.