d_ and the _Schoolboy_! Could anyone but himself attempt
such a wonderful variety, such an amazing contrast of character, and
be equally great in all? No, no, no! Garrick, take the chair."

Garrick was, without doubt, a very intense actor; he threw himself
most thoroughly into any part that he was playing. Certainly we know
that he was not wanting in reverence for Shakespeare; in spite of the
liberties which he ventured to take with the poet's text, he loved
and worshipped him. To Powell, who threatened to be at one time a
formidable rival, his advice was, "Never let your Shakespeare be out
of your hands; keep him about you as a charm; the more you read him,
the more you will like him, and the better you will act." As to his
yielding to the popular taste for pantomime and spectacle, he may
plead a justification in the words which his friend Johnson put into
his mouth in the Prologue that he wrote for the inauguration of his
management at Drury Lane:--

"The Drama's laws the Drama's patrons give,
And we, who live to please, must please to live."

We must remember how much he did for the stage. Though his alterations
of Shakespeare shock us, they are nothing to those outrages committed
by others, who deformed the poet beyond recognition. Garrick made
Shakespeare's plays once more popular. He purged the actors, for a
time at least, of faults that were fatal to any high class of drama,
and, above all, he gradually got rid of those abominable nuisances
(to which we have already alluded), the people who came and took their
seats at the wings, on the stage itself, while the performance was
going on, hampering the efforts of the actors and actresses. The stage
would have had much to thank Garrick for if he had done nothing more
than this--if only that he was the first manager who kept the audience
where they ought to be, on the other side of the footlights.

In his private life Garrick was most happy. He was fortunate enough
to find for his wife a simple-minded, loyal woman, in a quarter which
some people would deem very unpromising. Mrs. Garrick was, as is
well-known, a celebrated _danseuse_, known as Mademoiselle Violette,
whose real name was Eva Maria Weigel, a Viennese. A more affectionate
couple were never seen; they were not blessed with children, but they
lived together in the most uninterrupted happiness, and their house
was the scene of many social gatherings of a delightful kind. Mrs.
Garrick survived her