Hamlet, Jane Shore, Isabella, succeeded in gaining the suffrages of her Bath audience.
We find the "tonish" young men, on the occasion of her benefit, presenting her with sixty guineas "in order to secure tickets, as they were afraid the demand for them would be so great by-and-bye." "Was it not elegant?" she asks. One of these benefits produced to her one hundred and forty-six pounds—a handsome sum in those days. Before two years of her four years' stay at Bath had elapsed, we see her the favourite and friend of all the great people in the place. The Duchess of Devonshire showed her particular favour; and subsequently, when her engagement at Drury Lane hung in the balance, threw the weight of her influence, which was supreme, into the scale.
We cannot help remarking, in spite of the accusations so frequently brought against her of her love of fine friends, that those who clustered about her in those early Bath days occupied the same position in her heart thirty years later. One of these, a Dr. Whalley, and his wife, were true and devoted friends all her life, and her letters to him contribute some of the most valuable materials we have for writing her life. Dr. Thomas Sedgwick Whalley was a gentleman of taste and good income, derived from his own private estates, and the rich stipend of an unwholesome Lincolnshire living, which a kind-hearted bishop had given him on condition he never resided on it. He enjoyed some literary celebrity as the author of a long narrative poem, Edwy and Edilda. He occupied one of the finest houses on the Crescent; was intimate with Mrs. Piozzi; corresponded with the voluminous letter-writer, Miss Seward; and was, in fact, a fine specimen of the dilettante gentleman of the old school.
