been reached through years of toil.  He seems to have charmed all classes:  the learned and the ignorant, the cultured and the vulgar; great statesmen, poets, and even the fribbles of fashion were all nearly unanimous in his praise.  The dissentient voices were so few that they were drowned in the clamor of applause.  Quinn might snarl and growl; and Horace Walpole, who seems to have grown alarmed at so much of the incense of praise finding its way to the nostrils of another, might give vent to a few feeble sneers; such as when he said, “I do not mention the things written in his praise because he writes most of them himself.”  But the battle was won.  Nature in the place of Artificiality, Originality in the place of Conventionality, had triumphed on the stage once more.

Consternation reigned in the home at Lichfield when the news arrived that brother David had become a play-actor; but ultimately the family were reconciled to such degradation by the substantial results of the experiment.  Such reconcilements are not uncommon.  Some young man of good birth and position has taken to the stage; his family, who could not afford to keep him, have been shocked, and in pious horror have cast him out of their respectable circle; but at last success has come, and they have managed to overcome their scruples and prejudices and to profit by the harvest which the actor has reaped.

Garrick seems to have continued playing under the name of Lydall for two months, though the secret must have been an open one.  It was not till December the second, the night of his benefit, that he was at last announced under his own name; and henceforward his career was one long triumph, checkered, indeed, by disagreements, quarrels and heart-burnings (for Garrick was extremely sensitive), caused, for the most part, by the envy and jealousy which invariably dog the heels of success.

Second-rate actors, like Theophilus Gibber, or gnats such as Murphy, and others, easily stung him.  He was lampooned as “The Sick Monkey” on his return to the stage after having taken a much needed rest.  But discretion and audacity seemed to go hand-in-hand, and the self-satisfied satirizer generally over-shoots the mark.  Garrick was ever ready with a reply to his assailants; when Dr. Hill attacked his pronunciation, saying that he pronounced his “i’s” as if they were “u’s,” Garrick answered—­

    “If ’tis true, as you say, that I’ve injured a letter,
    I’ll change my note soon, and I hope for the better. 
    May the just right of letters as well as of men,
    Hereafter be fixed by the tongue and the pen. 
    Most devoutly I wish that they both have their due,
    And that I may be never mistaken for U.”