the Clairon;[2] but when I hear of the French admiration of Garrick, it takes off something of my wonder at the prodigious adoration of him at home.  I never could conceive the marvellous merit of repeating the works of others in one’s own language with propriety, however well delivered.  Shakespeare is not more admired for writing his plays, than Garrick for acting them.  I think him a very good and very various player—­but several have pleased me more, though I allow not in so many parts.  Quin[3] in Falstaff, was as excellent as Garrick[4] in Lear.  Old Johnson far more natural in everything he attempted.  Mrs. Porter and your Dumesnil surpassed him in passionate tragedy; Cibber and O’Brien were what Garrick could never reach, coxcombs, and men of fashion.  Mrs. Clive is at least as perfect in low comedy—­and yet to me, Ranger was the part that suited Garrick the best of all he ever performed.  He was a poor Lothario, a ridiculous Othello, inferior to Quin in Sir John Brute and Macbeth, and to Cibber in Bayes, and a woful Lord Hastings and Lord Townley.  Indeed, his Bayes was original, but not the true part:  Cibber was the burlesque of a great poet, as the part was designed, but Garrick made it a Garretteer.  The town did not like him in Hotspur, and yet I don’t know whether he did not succeed in it beyond all the rest.  Sir Charles Williams and Lord Holland thought so too, and they were no bad judges.  I am impatient to see the Clairon, and certainly will, as I have promised, though I have not fixed my day.  But do you know you alarm me!  There was a time when I was a match for Madame de Mirepoix at pharaoh, to any hour of the night, and I believe did play with her five nights in a week till three and four in the morning—­but till eleven o’clock to-morrow morning—­Oh! that is a little too much, even at loo.  Besides, I shall not go to Paris for pharaoh—­if I play all night, how shall I see everything all day?

[Footnote 1:  Schouvaloff was notorious as a favourite of the Empress Catharine.]

[Footnote 2:  Mdlle.  Clairon had been for some years the most admired tragic actress in France.  In that age actors and actresses in France were exposed to singular insults.  M. Lacroix, in his “France in the Eighteenth Century,” tells us:  “They were considered as inferior beings in the social scale; excommunicated by the Church, and banished from society, they were compelled to endure all the humiliations and affronts which the public chose to inflict on them in the theatre; and, if any of them had the courage to make head against the storm, and to resist the violence and cruelty of the pit, they were sent to prison, and not released but on condition of apologising to the tyrants who had so cruelly insulted them.  Many had a sufficient sense of their own dignity to withdraw themselves from this odious despotism after having been in prison in Fort l’Evecque, their ordinary place of confinement, by the order of the gentlemen of the chamber or the lieutenant of police;