For the male habiliments of the Widow Brady, the young actress found on the night of the performance that no provision had been made. The story goes that a gentleman politely left the box where he was seated, lent her his coat, and stood in the side-scenes with a petticoat over his shoulders until his property was restored to him. Whether this courteous individual was Lord Aylesbury we are not told, but we know that he was one of Miss Boyle's party.
The particular fascination of Mrs. Siddons's acting in those early days was its simplicity and pathos, which, united with remarkable beauty and power of expression, gained the hearts of all rustic audiences. Her talent, however, seems to have been singularly immature, considering the continual practice she had enjoyed, almost from her cradle, in stage affairs. Rachel reached the summit of her power at seventeen, Mrs. Siddons not until she was thirty. She herself confesses later, in the account she gives of her first reading of Macbeth: "Being then only twenty years of age, I believed, as many others do believe, that little more was necessary than to get the words into my head; for the necessity of discrimination, and the development of character, at that time of my life, had scarcely entered into my imagination."
The power of drawing tears, however, was already hers, and rumours of the charm and beauty of the young actress had been wafted to London, reaching even the ears of the great Garrick himself. Mrs. Siddons tells us, in her Autograph Recollections: "Mr. King, by order of Mr. Garrick, who had heard some account of me from the Aylesbury family, came to Cheltenham to see me in the Fair Penitent. I knew neither Mr. King nor his purpose at the time." Neither
