Page:Lives of Poets-Laureate.djvu/296

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COLLEY CIBBER.

his usual health, at nine he was found quite dead. Of his many children, two only acquired any notoriety, his son Theophilus, who was a great profligate, but a tolerable actor, and, like his father, excelled in the characters of fops and old men, and his youngest child Charlotte.

A witticism of the son has been preserved. The father once meeting him dressed in the extreme of foppery, surveyed him curiously for some minutes, and then said, with great disdain: "Indeed, The, I pity you." "Don't pity me, Sir," replied the son, "pity my tailor."

The career of his daughter Charlotte was so eccentric, replete with such singular vicissitudes, that we cannot resist devoting a paragraph to her memory. She seemed to labour under a deficiency in some one faculty, which more than neutralized the unusual activity of all the rest. Ardent, intelligent, and persevering, her conduct ever bordered on the extravagant; a Lola Montes in her day, though with greater virtue, and, therefore, not so fortunate as to win the favour of kings and guardsmen. The principal materials of this sketch are to be found in a narrative written by herself, and dedicated to herself, to which she affixed the following appropriate motto:

"This tragic story, or this comic jest,
May make you laugh or cry, as you like best."

In very early life she gave indications of an excitable temperament, and an unruly will. Among her juvenile pranks, she relates how one morning, when but four years old, she got up early, put on her father's wig, dressed herself as well as she could in male attire, and mimicing the paternal strut, went out to receive the obeisances of the passers-by: how, on another occasion, her father was awoke by deafening acclamations, and on looking out of the window, beheld his hopeful daughter making a tri-