THE LETTER TO HER MOTHER, WHICH MRS. INCH

BALD LEFT ON HER TABLE WHEN SHE QUITTED STANDINgfield.

"By the time you receive this I shall have left Standingfield, and perhaps for ever. You are surprised, but be not uneasy:-believe the step I have taken, however indiscreet, is no ways criminal; unless I sin by not acquainting you with it, which was impossible for me to do, though strongly pressed by the desire of giving you a personal farewell. I now endure every pang-one not lost to all feeling must-on thus quitting the tenderest and best of parents; I would say most beloved too, but cannot prove my affection;-yet time may;-to that I must submit my hope of regaining your regard.

"The censure of the world I despise; as the most worthy incur the reproaches of that. Should I ever think you wish to hear from me, I will write."

CHAPTER II.

Juvenile indiscretions-Her secret arrival in London-Adventures -Two Inns-Reddish-King-Her brother Slender meets herWrites at length to her sister-Dodd and his impudence-Gets into hot water-Mr. Inchbald counsels her, and marries her in June, 1772, by the Catholic and Protestant rites-Leave London together for Bristol-Begins her studies professionally-Cordelia -Garrick on Shakspeare-Stolen from the French-Becomes acquainted with Mrs. Hartley-First appearance on the StageParallel lives of Centlivre and Inchbald.

Ir is difficult in treating of juvenile indiscretion, to speak of such instances as not only seem borne out by the subsequent conduct, but give that direction, and inspire those powers which lead the person to his peculiar good; to distinction, to affluence, to perhaps lasting fame. There is a danger lest an inference should be drawn that tends to fatalism, and the train of evils that result from supposing the suggestions of our inexperience the heralds only of our just and assigned course. Had Shakspeare not fled from Stratford and his home, he had probably been a glover like his father, never trod the stage as his own Adam, nor written those immortal dramas that returned

him to the Avon with wealth and honour, and rendered him the glory of his country. The same inference may be drawn from the progress and humbler success of Mrs. Inchbald.

But youth should be early admonished to look to the general consequences of indiscretion, rather than the partial exceptions that the world offers; and by no means mistake a happy result for the moral sanction of irregular and indiscreet desires. They should remember the argument of the philosopher, when he was shown the pictures of such as had escaped from storms at sea:-" I see the portraits of those who were saved; but where are the likenesses of the shipwrecked-those who perished in the ocean?" In the case of Mrs. Inchbald too, it may be remarked, that had she possessed less power of mind, so as to have remitted in her painful studies, and indulged herself, rather than nourished others, she would have missed the applause of the public, and never approached the elevated society which thought itself honoured by her talents and her virtues.

We now proceed in the narrative. In her memorandum she says-"On the 11th of April, early in the morning, with much fear and difficulty, I left my mother's house unknown to any one, came to London in the Norwich Fly, and got lodgings

"Ita fit: illi enim nusquam picti sunt, qui naufragia fecerunt, in maríque perierunt." CICERO, DE NATURA DEOR. L. 111. § 37.

at the Rose and Crown in St. John's Street." It is difficult to see her object with any distinctness. The mere girlish fancy of seeing the world could hardly be indulged, because she would herself be seen-an object of great alarm to her. "On the 12th, in the morning, I went to Charing Cross." This was for the purpose of calling upon a distant connexion, whom she understood to live opposite Northumberland House; but to her infinite chagrin, she found her friends had quitted business, and retired from London altogether into Wales. She was thus disappointed of her protector and assured asylum; and her mind became startled, confused, and wretched. She fancied once that she saw Mr. Pitt, whom the reader will remember as one of Mr. Inchbald's friends. In the afternoon she took a short walk, and in the evening a very long one to Covent Garden: she now dreaded the meeting with any relation, and once fancied that she saw her brother and sister Slender, and her sister D. Hunt. On the 13th she did not venture out till the evening, when she called on Mr. Reddish, and from him went to Mr. King's; and, as she says, expected a call from him on the following morning at her lodgings; but he did not come. She now began to dread she knew not what; to suspect the very courtesy of her landlady; and her mind, impregnated with the terrors so happily laid in the way of youth by our novelists, she imagined every lusty motherly-looking

woman to be a Sinclair planning her destruction; and fancied that Mr. King, from the lodging when he saw it, had determined to give himself no farther trouble about her.

"A thousand fantasies began to throng

Into her memory;"

and in the afternoon she left her lodgings and got others, after many strange adventures, at the White Swan on Holborn Bridge. What these

were she does not register in her diary, and we therefore cannot rely upon the highly fanciful tale which was dressed up by the Magazines; totally indeed at variance with the knowledge of London which she had previously acquired. It would not be safe to desert the actual stepping-stones which she herself has marked down to enable us to track her progress. We will not however suppress, in this instance, some particulars which she certainly had seen, as they were published under the direction of a person who was known to her. Though the old discoverer time shows their inaccuracy one way, there may be something like the facts in the adventures themselves, which certainly justify her own epithet of strange. The reader will remark that, instead however of occurring on the night of her arrival, they did not happen till two days afterwards.

This statement makes her get into a hackneycoach upon getting out of the Diligence, and drive.