popular novelties of the day, he was able to command their support when he sought it for a nobler form of Drama.  He married an actress, Mrs. Saunderson, who was only inferior in her art to her husband.  Their married life seems to have been one of perfect happiness.  When one hears so much of the profligacy of actors and actresses, and that they are all such a very wicked lot, it is pleasant to think of this couple, in an age proverbial for its immorality, in a city where the highest in rank set an example of shameless licence, living their quiet, pure, artistic life, respected and beloved by all that knew them.

Betterton had few physical advantages.  If we are to believe Antony Aston, one of his contemporaries, he had “a short, thick neck, stooped in the shoulders, and had fat, short arms, which he rarely lifted higher than his stomach.  His left hand frequently lodged in his breast, between his coat and waistcoat, while with his right hand he prepared his speech.”  Yet the same critic is obliged to confess that, at seventy years of age, a younger man might have personated but could not have acted, Hamlet better.  He calls his voice “low and grumbling,” but confesses that he had such power over it that he could enforce attention even from fops and orange-girls.  I dare say you all know how Steele and Addison admired his acting, and how enthusiastically they spoke of it in The Tatler.  The latter writes eloquently of the wonderful agony of jealousy and the tenderness of love which he showed in Othello, and of the immense effect he produced in Hamlet.

Betterton, like all really great men, was a hard worker.  Pepys says of him, “Betterton is a very sober, serious man, and studious, and humble, following of his studies; and is rich already with what he gets and saves.”  Alas! the fortune so hardly earned was lost in an unlucky moment:  he entrusted it to a friend to invest in a commercial venture in the East Indies which failed most signally.  Betterton never reproached his friend, he never murmured at his ill-luck.  The friend’s daughter was left unprovided for; but Betterton adopted the child, educated her for the stage, and she became an actress of merit, and married Bowman, the player, afterwards known as “The Father of the Stage.”

In Betterton’s day there were no long runs of pieces; but, had his lot been cast in these times, he might have been compelled to perform, say, Hamlet for three hundred or four hundred nights:  for the rights of the majority are entitled to respect in other affairs besides politics, and if the theatre-going public demand a play (and our largest theatres only hold a limited number) the manager dare not cause annoyance and disappointment by withdrawing it.

Like Edmund Kean, Betterton may be said to have died upon the stage; for in April, 1710, when he took his last benefit, as Melantius, in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Maid’s Tragedy (an adaption of which, by the way, was played by Macready under the title of The Bridal,) he was suffering tortures from gout, and had almost to be carried to his dressing-room; and though he acted the part with all his old fire, speaking these very appropriate words:—­