Surely a star, possibly Venus, must have danced gaily on a certain
night in the year of grace 1683, when the wife of Captain Oldfield,
gentleman by birth and Royal Guardsman by profession, brought into the
busy, unfeeling world of London a pretty mite of a girl. 'Twas a year
of grace indeed, for the little stranger happened to be none other
than Anne Oldfield, whose elegance of manner, charm of voice and
action and loveliness of face would in time make her the most
delightful comedienne of her day. Perhaps she found no instant
welcome, this diminutive maiden who came smiling into existence laden
with a message from the sunshine; her father was richer in ancestry
than guineas, and the arrival of another daughter may have seemed an
honour hardly worth the bestowal.[A] But Thalia laughed, as well she
might, and even the stern features of Melpomene relaxed a little in
witnessing the birth of one who would prove almost as wondrous in
tragedy, when she so minded, as she was fascinating in the gentler
phases of her art.

[Footnote A: According to Edmund Bellchambers, Anne Oldfield "would
have possessed a tolerable fortune, had not her father, a captain in
the army, expended it at a very early period."]

Yet the laughter of Thalia and the unbending of her sister Muse were
hardly likely to make much impression in the Oldfield household, where
money had more admirers than mythology, and so we are not surprised to
learn that, with the death of the gallant captain, this "incomparable
sweet girl," who would ere long reconcile even a supercilious
Frenchman to the English stage, had to seek her living as a
seamstress. How she sewed a bodice or hemmed a petticoat we know not,
nor do we care; it is far more interesting to be told that, though
only in her early teens, the toiler with the needle found her greatest