until twelve years afterwards that she could get it published. She
came to London again, and wrote farces, which she could not get
accepted; but she obtained an increase of salary to three pounds a
week by unwillingly consenting not only to act in plays, but also to
walk in pantomime. At last, in July, 1784, her first farce, "The
Mogul Tale," was acted. It brought her a hundred guineas. Three
years later her success as a writer had risen so far that she
obtained nine hundred pounds by a little piece called "Such Things
Are." She still lived sparingly, invested savings, and was liberal
only to the poor, and chiefly to her sisters and the poor members of
her family. She finished a sketch of her life in 1786, for which a
publisher, without seeing it, offered a thousand pounds. But there
was more satirical comment in it than she liked, and she resolved to
do at once what she would wish done at the point of death. She
destroyed the record.

In 1791 Mrs. Inchbald published her "Simple Story." Her other tale,
"Nature and Art," followed in 1794, when Mrs. Inchbald's age was
forty-one. She had retired from the stage five years before, with
an income of fifty-eight pounds a year, all she called her own out
of the independence secured by her savings. She lived in cheap
lodgings, and had sometimes to wait altogether on herself; at one
lodging "fetching up her own water three pair of stairs, and
dropping a few tears into the heedless stream, as any other wounded
deer might do." Later in life, she wrote to a friend from a room in
which she cooked, and ate, and also her saucepans were cleaned:-
"Thank God, I can say No. I say No to all the vanities of the
world, and perhaps soon shall have to say that I allow my poor
infirm sister a hundred a year. I have raised my allowance to
eighty; but in the rapid stride of her wants, and my obligation as a