gave to her conversation, which was both humorous and witty, a most peculiar and comical charm.  Once, after traveling all day in a pouring rain, on alighting at her inn, the coachman, dripping all over with wet, offered his arm to help her out of the coach, when she exclaimed, to the great amusement of her fellow-travelers, “Oh, no, no! y-y-y-you will give me m-m-m-my death of c-c-c-cold; do bring me a-a-a-a dry man.”  An aristocratic neighbor of hers, with whom she was slightly acquainted, driving with his daughter in the vicinity of her very humble suburban residence, overtook her walking along the road one very hot day, and, stopping his carriage, asked her to let him have the pleasure of taking her home; when she instantly declined, with the characteristic excuse that she had just come from the market gardener’s:  “And, my lord, I-I-I have my pocket f-f-full of onions,”—­an unsophisticated statement of facts which made them laugh extremely.  At the first reading of one of her pieces, a certain young lady, with rather a lean, lanky figure, being proposed to her for the part of the heroine, she indignantly exclaimed, “No, no, no; I-I-I-I won’t have that s-s-s-stick of a girl!  D-d-d-do give me a-a-a girl with bumps!” Coming off the stage one evening, she was about to sit down by Mrs. Siddons in the green-room, when suddenly, looking at her magnificent neighbor, she said, “No, I won’t s-s-s-sit by you; you’re t-t-t-too handsome!”—­in which respect she certainly need have feared no competition, and less with my aunt than any one, their style of beauty being so absolutely dissimilar.  Somebody speaking of having oysters for supper, much surprise was excited by Mrs. Inchbald’s saying that she had never eaten one.  Questions and remonstrances, exclamations of astonishment, and earnest advice to enlarge her experience in that respect, assailed her from the whole green-room, when she finally delivered herself thus:  “Oh no, indeed!  I-I-I-I never, never could!  What! e-e-e-eat the eyes and t-t-t-the nose, the teeth a-a-a-and the toes, the a-a-a-all of a creature!” She was an enthusiastic admirer of my uncle John, and the hero of her “Simple Story,” Doriforth, is supposed to have been intended by her as a portrait of him.  On one occasion, when she was sitting by the fireplace in the green-room, waiting to be called upon the stage, she and Miss Mellon (afterward Mrs. Coutts and Duchess of St Albans) were laughingly discussing their male friends and acquaintances from the matrimonial point of view.  My uncle John, who was standing near, excessively amused, at length jestingly said to Mrs. Inchbald, who had been comically energetic in her declarations of who she could or would, or never could or would, have married, “Well, Mrs. Inchbald, would you have had me?” “Dear heart!” said the stammering beauty, turning her sweet sunny face up to him, “I’d have j-j-j-jumped at you!”