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Rh "dear Muse," "have I ever admired Mrs. Siddons so much since; for, though I can pity a dupe, I must also despise one. Even to be familiar with such people was a lack of virtue, though not of chastity."

We read later in Rogers's Table Talk that, not long before Mrs. Inchbald's death he met her walking near Charing Cross, and we are not astonished to be told that she had been calling on several old friends, but had seen none of them—some being really not at home, and others denying themselves to her. "I called," she said, "on Mrs. Siddons. I knew she was at home, yet I was not admitted."

To return, however, to the Galindos. The wretched woman was stung to the quick by the withdrawal of her engagement at Covent Garden, and although Mrs. Siddons advanced a thousand pounds to the husband to buy a share in a provincial theatre, and showed them much kindness, the jealous and infuriated wife published in pamphlet form a wild and libellous attack on the great actress, to which she added the letters that had passed between them in their days of intimacy. By artfully turning and suppressing sentences here and there, she succeeded in giving a significance never intended in the originals. Although she said she had advanced nothing but what she could substantiate by the most certain evidence, if called upon to do so, she gave no proof whatever except of her own wild jealousy and unreasoning disappointment at being refused an engagement at Covent Garden.

It seems incredible that a woman of Mrs. Siddons's social knowledge can have been so imprudent as to enter into such an intimacy, and to write in such a strain of deep affection to people she had