went to the play, and saw the bridegroom play the part of Mr. Oakley
in the "Jealous Wife." Mr. Inchbald was thirty-seven years old, and
had sons by a former marriage. In September, 1772, Mrs. Inchbald
tried her fortune on the stage by playing Cordelia to her husband's
Lear. Beauty alone could not assure success. The impediment in
speech made it impossible for Mrs. Inchbald to succeed greatly as an
actress. She was unable to realise her own conceptions. At times
she and her husband prospered so little that on one day their dinner
was of turnips, pulled and eaten in a field, and sometimes there was
no dinner at all. But better days presently followed; first
acquaintance of Mrs. Inchbald with Mrs. Siddons grew to a strong
friendship, and this extended to the other members of the Kemble
family.

After seven years of happy but childless marriage, Mrs. Inchbald was
left a widow at the age of twenty-six. In after years, when
devoting herself to the baby of one of her landladies, she wrote to
a friend,--"I shall never again have patience with a mother who
complains of anything but the loss of her children; so no complaints
when you see me again. Remember, you have had two children, and I
never had one." After her husband's death, Mrs. Inchbald's beauty
surrounded her with admirers, some of them rich, but she did not
marry again. To one of those who offered marriage, she replied that
her temper was so uncertain that nothing but blind affection in a
husband could bear with it. Yet she was patiently living and
fighting the world on a weekly salary of about thirty shillings, out
of which she helped her poorer sisters. When acting at Edinburgh
she spent on herself only eight shillings a week in board and
lodging. It was after her husband's death that Mrs. Inchbald
finished a little novel, called "A Simple Story," but it was not