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Neither was he "a man of parts," precisely; being in himself a distinct whole. His choice of reading was ruled by a fastidious need. At one time he examined Pascal, at another he read something of Corneille and a part of Racine. Of the English dramatists, he seems at this time to have tried only Massinger; "Inchbald's Theatre" also occurs.
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.
Inchbald's saying that she had never eaten one. Questions and remonstrances, exclamations of astonishment, and earnest advice to enlarge her experience in that respect, assailed her from the whole green-room, when she finally delivered herself thus: "Oh no, indeed! I-I-I-I never, never could! What! e-e-e-eat the eyes and t-t-t-the nose, the teeth a-a-a-and the toes, the a-a-a-all of a creature!"
His words roused all Mrs. Inchbald's ill-feeling, and, with a singular want of consideration, she sent with her condolences an elaborate explanation of her own conduct. Two or three more notes passed between them. Godwin's plain-speaking he told his correspondent very clearly what he thought of her is excusable.
He had a natural taste for reading every possible kind of book which did not fall into his school-course. It was only when they forced his head into the waters of knowledge, that he refused to drink. He devoured all the books at home from Inchbald's Theatre to White's Farriery; he ransacked the neighbouring book-cases.
Inchbald's prediction that "fine ladies, milliners, mantua-makers, and boarding-school girls will love to tremble over it, and that men of taste and judgment will admire the superior talents, the incessant energy of mind you have evinced." He was at this time one of the most conspicuous and most talked-about men in London.
"Many times," she says, "during the winter, when I was crying with cold, have I said to myself, 'Thank God, my dear sister need not leave her chamber; she will find her fire ready for her each morning; for she is now far less able than I am to endure privation." Mrs. Inchbald's family were, for the most part very poor; and she felt it right to support them during their numerous afflictions.
Inchbald's own writing and adaptation; one of Holcroft's later works; one of Cumberland's; and the other five made up of lesser pieces by Colman the younger, Dibdin, and others, serious plays in blank verse such as Hannah More's Percy, and the Honourable John St. John's Mary Queen of Scots, etc.
It may need, perhaps, the writer's memory and associations to find in this a touching expression of his winning character, his playful smile, and pleasant ways. "You know Mrs. Inchbald's story, Nature and Art?" wrote Thomas Hood, once, in a letter: "What a fine Edition of Nature and Art is Stanfield!" Gone! And many and many a dear old day gone with him! But their memories remain.
The best idea of the state of the drama between 1790 and 1810 may perhaps be obtained by any one who cares to look through it would require a monomania, a desert island, or at least a succession of wet days in a country inn to enable any one to read through the ten volumes of Mrs. Inchbald's Modern British Theatre, printed in 1811 "from the prompt-books of the Theatres Royal."
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