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252 his part, after much misgiving, was assigned to Cibber, and the author's judgment was vindicated by the brilliant way in which Cibber depicted the character. His salary was thereupon increased to twenty shillings a-week.

He was not two-and-twenty when he thought himself prosperous enough to marry. Miss Shore was the object of his choice. Her father was so enraged at the match, that he squandered most of his property in building a retreat on the Thames, afterwards known as Shore's Folly, but which has long since been pulled down. He was reconciled to them, however, before he died, and left them some poor remnant of his once handsome fortune. Cibber's income at this juncture consisted of £20 a-year allowed by his father, and twenty shillings a-week, his salary as an actor. "To complete his fortune," he now tells us, "he turned poet." His constitutional hilarity of disposition bore him up through all his difficulties; but the managers were tardy in appreciating his merits, and his advance was slow.

On the secession of Betterton, Mrs. Barry and others, to the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, he received an increase of pay, to keep him from following in the train of the disaffected. The company by this rupture was reduced to the most grievous straits, as they had to withstand the competition of those who had hitherto proved their chief source of attraction. One part of the tactics of the rival theatres was to play the same pieces against each other, and thus try to outdo each other in the public favour by superiority of acting. The play that was first chosen to exhibit the respective merits of the antagonists, was Congreve's "Old Bachelor." Powell was to mimic Betterton in Heartwell, and, after some hesitation, the part of Fondlewife was entrusted to Cibber. Dogget had acquired great popularity in that character—so great, indeed, that the part and the actor were inseparably connected