was that day. This was between one and two, and Shirley ordered the horses to the coach that moment, and bid the Misses fly up and dress, for they must go without dinner. Dinner! Lord, they did not want dinner-and away they went to take up their party, which was Governor Tryon, Lady and daughter. Everything happened right. They got their places without the least trouble or difficulty, and liked everything they saw except the Garrick. They didn't see much in him. You may reverse it if you please, and assure yourself they liked nothing else. They think themselves under such obligations to me for my goodness to them, that we are all invited to dine there to-day, when I shall give you for my toast.

I hope my dear Mrs. Garrick is well. I will not say anything about you, for they say you are in such spirits that you intend playing till next September. Adieu, my dear sir, be assured I am ever yours, 'PIVY CLIVE.'

Before this letter had reached Garrick's hands-it is endorsed by him as received 12th of June-he had bidden adieu to the stage. On the 10th, the very day his old comrade was proposing him as her toast,' he had gone through that trying ordeal, which, had she been aware of it, would have made her voice choke with emotion. The piece selected was 'The Wonder; and it was announced, with Garrick's usual good taste, simply as a performance for the benefit of the Theatrical Fund.' No gigantic posters, no newspaper puffs clamorously invoked the public interest. The town knew only too well what it was going to lose, and every corner of the theatre was crammed. In his zeal for the charity of which he was the founder, and to which this 'mean' man contributed over 50001, Garrick had written an occasional Prologue, to bespeak the goodwill of his audience in its favour. It has all his wonted vivacity and point, and one line

'A fellow-feeling makes one wondrous kind'—

has passed into a household phrase. This he spoke as only he could speak such things. He had entire command of his spirits, and he even thought that he never played Don Felix to more advantage. So, at least, he wrote to Madame Necker eight days afterwards; but when it came to taking the last farewell, he adds

I not only lost the use of my voice, but of my limbs, too; it was indeed, as I said, a most awful moment. You would not have thought an English audience void of feeling, if you had then seen and heard them. After I had left the stage, and was dead to them, they would not suffer the petite pièce to go on; nor would the actors perform, they were so affected; in short, the public was very generous, and I am most grateful.'-Garrick Correspondence, ii. 161.

To do consciously for the last time what has been the work

and

and the delight of a life would agitate the stoutest heart; but to do it in the face of those, whose sympathy has been your best reward, one would suppose almost too much for endurance. That Garrick felt this is plain. His parting words were full of feeling and solemnity :

It has been customary,' he said, for persons in my situation to address you in a farewell epilogue. I had the same intention, and turned my thoughts that way; but I found myself then as incapable of writing such an epilogue, as I should be now of speaking it.

The jingle of rhyme and the language of fiction would but ill suit my present feelings.

This is to me a very awful moment; it is no less than parting for ever with those from whom I have received the greatest kindness, and upon the spot where that kindness and your favour was enjoyed. (Here his voice failed him; and he paused, till relieved by tears).

Whatever may be the changes of my future life, the deepest impression of your kindness will always remain here-here, in my heart, fixed and unutterable.

· I will very readily agree to my successors having more skill and ability for their station, than I have had; but I defy them all to take more uninterrupted pains for your favour, or to be more truly sensible of it, than is your grateful humble servant.'

On this, writes Mr. Fitzgerald, 'he retired slowly up-up the stage; his eyes fixed upon them with a lingering longing. Then stopped. The shouts of applause from that brilliant amphitheatre were broken by sobs and tears. To his ears were borne from many quarters, "Farewell! Farewell! Farewell!" The wonderful eyes, still brilliant, were turned wistfully again and again to that sea of sympathetic faces, and at last, with an effort, he tore himself from their view.'

And so without fuss or flourish-true genius and gentleman as he was-passed from the stage the greatest actor of modern times. In the short period that was left to him he was as happy as 'honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,' and his own keen relish for social enjoyment could make him. He was courted and caressed by the best, the ablest, the highest in the land. At Court he had always been a favourite, and there was a talk of knighting him; this distinction, however, he declined.

I should never have supposed it to have been of your own seeking,' writes Mrs. Pye (15th April, 1777), 'for it has ever been remarked to your honour, that you never employed your ample fortune to excite envy and to make fools stare, but in the rational and sober enjoyment of life. However, I will not allow you the whole merit of this neither; most men's follies are owing to their wives; and you have a wife whose judgment is as near infallible as ever fell to the lot of a mortal.'

Another

Another of the countless testimonies to Mrs. Garrick's worth. One of Johnson's many stupid sayings about Garrick was, 'Garrick, sir, has many friends, but no friend.' The man who was blest with such a wife wanted no other friend. As the charming Countess Spencer wrote to him (19th December, 1776), You, I am sure, can neither hear, see, nor understand without her.' With such a counsellor and companion by his side, Damon seeks no Pythias. Of friends, in the more restricted sense, no man had more. He seems never to have lost one who was worth the keeping. Pitt and Lyttleton, of whose praise he was so proud in 1741, were strongly attached to him to the end of their days. Lord Chatham, from his retirement at Mount Edgecumbe, in some scholarly lines, invited him to visit

'A statesman without pow'r and without gall,
Hating no courtiers, happier than them all;'

and Lord Lyttleton (12th October, 1771) wrote to him

"I think I love you more than one of my age ought to do, for at a certain time of life, the heart should lose something of its sensibility; but you have called back all mine, and I feel for you as I did for the dearest of my friends in the first warmth of my youth.'

So it was with Bishops Newton and Warburton, with Lord Camden, with Burke-to whom he was always dear David' or 'dearest Garrick '--with Hogarth, with Reynolds, and with hosts of others. And indeed a nature so kindly, so sympathetic, so little exacting, might well endear him to his friends. His very foibles, of which so much has been made; his over-eagerness to please; his little arts of finesse to secure the admiration which would have been his without effort; that acting off the stage of him who was 'natural, simple, and affecting' upon it; were those of a loveable man. They speak of over-quick sensibility; and, balanced as they were by the finer qualities of generosity, constancy, tact, active goodness, by his wit and unfailing cheerfulness, they must even have helped to make up the charm of his character to those who knew him best. And then, as Johnson said, he was the first man in the world for sprightly conversation.' 'I thought him less to be envied on the stage than at the head of a table.' 'His conversation is gay and grotesque. It is a dish of all sorts, and all good things: a view which Burke incidentally confirms in a letter sending Garrick the present of a turtle, as 'a dish fit for one who represents all the solidity of flesh, the volatility of fowl, and the oddness of fish.' He shone as a talker, even in Paris, beside D'Holbach, Diderôt, Grimm, Marmontel, Helvétius, Beaumarchais, and the rest of that brilliant circle. Twelve years after Garrick's last visit there Gibbon

heard

heard people constantly exclaiming in the best society, with characteristic but pardonable vanity, Ce M. Garrick était fait pour vivre parmi nous; and they claimed a share in his renown by reason of the French blood in his veins.

Garrick did not enjoy his retirement long. While on his wonted Christmas visit to the Spencers at Althorp, in 1778, he was attacked by his old ailment. He hurried back to his house in the Adelphi, and, after some days of great pain and prostration, died upon the 20th of January following. His death was a national event. His body lay in state for two days, and so great was the crowd, that a military guard was necessary to keep order. His funeral was upon an imposing scale. The line of carriages extended from Charing Cross to Westminster Abbey, and the concourse of people of all ranks along the line of the procession was greater, say the papers of the day, 'than ever was remembered on any occasion. Among the pallbearers were Lord Camden, the Duke of Devonshire, Lord Spencer, Viscount Palmerston, and Sir W. W. Wynne, and the members of the Literary Club attended in a body, eager to pay the last honours not less to the friend than to the great actor, who, in Warburton's phrase, had 'lent dignity to his art.' There were many sad hearts and many tearful eyes around the grave where the cheerfullest man in England' was to be laid to his rest. One who had done him much wrong by many an ungracious speech we will believe did penance in that solemn hour. 'I saw old Samuel Johnson,' says Cumberland, 'standing beside his grave, at the foot of Shakspeare's monument, and bathed in tears.' Johnson wrote of the event afterwards as one that had eclipsed the gaiety of nations. He even offered to write his old pupil's life, if Mrs. Garrick would ask him. But, remembering the many savage slights he had shown to him that was gone, she was not likely to make such a request. It might have been wiser, however, to have done. so than to leave his good name at the mercy of such little-honest chroniclers as Murphy and Davies, whose misrepresentations she despised too much to think them even worthy of her notice.

'He

In October, 1822, at the extreme age of ninety-eight, Mrs. Garrick was found dead in her chair, having lived in full possession of her faculties to the last. For thirty years she would not suffer the room to be opened in which her husband had died. Years wrought no chill in her devotion to his memory. never was a husband to me,' she said, in her old age, to a friend; 'during the thirty years of our marriage he was always my lover! She was buried, in her wedding sheets, at the base of Shakspeare's statue, in the same grave which forty-three years before had closed over her dear Davie.'

ART.

ART. II.1. Report to the Secretary of State for India in Council on Railways in India, for the year 1867-68. By Juland Danvers, Esq., Government Director of the Indian Railway Companies. Presented to both Houses of Parliament by command of Her Majesty.

2. A Letter to the Secretary of State for India on the Constitution and Management of the East Indian Railway Company. By R. W. Crawford, Esq., M.P., the Chairman of the Company.

IT

T was the remark of Lord Dalhousie, that nothing short of a great victory or a great reverse was sufficient to create in English society even a transient interest in the affairs of India. Since this truth was uttered, eighty-four millions of English capital have been invested in Indian railways, and forty-nine thousand English proprietors of stock and debentures have acquired a direct interest in the prosperity of our Indian administration and in the permanence of our rule. It may, therefore, appear redundant to offer any apology for devoting a few pages to a summary review of an undertaking which involves pecuniary considerations of so large an amount, and which is fraught with consequences of the greatest importance to our great empire in the East, and to the hundred and fifty millions who compose it. The work we undertake is lightened in no small degree by the reports presented annually to the Secretary of State for India by Mr. Danvers, the official director, who represents the Government at all the meetings of the various Boards. They are distinguished as much by a judicious arrangement of the various branches of the subject as by an amplitude of detail, which, far from embarrassing the mind, leaves nothing to be desired to convey a clear and comprehensive view of this great enterprise, and of its progress from year to year. With the aid of the statements contained in his report, and of information derived from other sources, we propose briefly to sketch the early history and the distinguishing characteristics of the Indian system of railways, to give the latest statistical notices of them, and to touch on the influence they are exerting on the people and the government of India.

The idea of introducing railways into India was vaguely discussed in the Calcutta journals for several years before 1843; but the first definite and practical suggestion was made by Mr.-now Sir Macdonald-Stephenson, who resigned his professional prospects in England in that year, and proceeded to Calcutta with the determination to devote his energies to the establishment of railways on the continent of India. On the 1st of January,