obliged to seek the protection of the law. His bursting imagination was kept in check for some little time by the sobering effects of a term of imprisonment.
Sometimes, also, her would-be adorers boasted of favours never received.
"If you should meet a Mr. Seton," she wrote to Dr. Whalley, "who lived in Leicester Square, you must not be surprised to hear him talk of being very well with my sister and myself; for, since I have been here, I have heard the old fright has been giving it out in town. You will find him rather an unlikely person to be so great a favourite with women."
Amongst fashionable ladies she counted many and constant friends. The doors of Mrs. Montagu's house (centre of intellect and fashion) were always open to her; and we hear of her there on one occasion when all the "Blues" swarmed round their "Queen Bee," and she wore her celebrated dress embroidered with the "ruins of Palmyra."
Mrs. Damer (Anne Conway), daughter of General Conway, the celebrated sculptress and woman of fashion, was also one of her most intimate friends, and later in life the actress spent many hours in her studio when bitten herself with the love of modelling. Campbell says that Mrs. Siddons's love of modelling in clay, began at Birmingham; and he tells a story of her going into a shop there, seeing a bust of herself, which the shopman, not knowing who she was, told her was the likeness of the greatest actress in the world. Mrs. Siddons bought it, and, thinking she could make a better replica of her own features, set to work and made modelling a favourite pursuit. Whether the impetus was thus given we hardly know, but it was
