"Did you ever see so great and true an actress upon the whole ?" Mr.Cibber opened his eyes, a slight flush came into his wash-leather face, and he replied: "I have not only seen many equal, many superior to her, but I have seen some half dozen who would have eaten her up and spit her out again, and not known they had done anything out of the way." Here Pomander soothed the veteran's dudgeon by explaining in dulcet tones that his friend was not long from Shropshire, and--The critic interrupted him, and bade him not dilute the excuse.
Now Mr.Vane had as much to say as either of them, but he had not the habit, which dramatic folks have, of carrying his whole bank in his cheek-pocket, so they quenched him for two minutes.
But lovers are not silenced, he soon returned to the attack; he dwelt on the grace, the ease, the freshness, the intelligence, the universal beauty of Mrs.Woffington.Pomander sneered, to draw him out.

Cibber smiled, with good-natured superiority.

This nettled the young gentleman, he fired up, his handsome countenance glowed, he turned Demosthenes for her he loved.

One advantage he had over both Cibber and Pomander, a fair stock of classical learning; on this he now drew.
"Other actors and actresses," said he, "are monotonous in voice, monotonous in action, but Mrs.Woffington's delivery has the compass and variety of nature, and her movements are free from the stale uniformity that distinguishes artifice from art.

The others seem to me to have but two dreams of grace, a sort of crawling on stilts is their motion, and an angular stiffness their repose." He then cited the most famous statues of antiquity, and quoted situations in plays where, by her fine dramatic instinct, Mrs.Woffington, he said, threw her person into postures similar to these, and of equal beauty; not that she strikes attitudes like the rest, but she melts from one beautiful statue into another; and, if sculptors could gather from her immortal graces, painters, too, might take from her face the beauties that belong of right to passion and thought, and orators might revive their withered art, and learn from those golden lips the music of old Athens, that quelled tempestuous mobs, and princes drunk with victory.
Much as this was, he was going to say more, ever so much more, but he became conscious of a singular sort of grin upon every face; this grin made him turn rapidly round to look for its cause.