But the comedians of this day are weak-strained _farceurs_ compared with her, and her tragic tone was thunder set to music.
"I saw a brigadier-general cry like a child at her Indiana; I have seen her crying with pain herself at the wing (for she was always a great sufferer), I have seen her then spring upon the stage as Lady Townley, and in a moment sorrow brightened into joy: the air seemed to fill with singing-birds, that chirped the pleasures of fashion, love and youth in notes sparkling like diamonds and stars and prisms.

She was above criticism, out of its scope, as is the blue sky; men went not to judge her, they drank her, and gazed at her, and were warmed at her, and refreshed by her.

The fops were awed into silence, and with their humbler betters thanked Heaven for her, if they thanked it for anything.
"In all the crowded theater, care and pain and poverty were banished from the memory, while Oldfield's face spoke, and her tongue flashed melodies; the lawyer forgot his quillets; the polemic, the mote in his brother's eye; the old maid, her grudge against the two sexes; the old man, his gray hairs and his lost hours.

And can it be, that all this which should have been immortal, is quite--quite lost, is as though it had never been ?" he sighed.

"Can it be that its fame is now sustained by me; who twang with my poor lute, cracked and old, these feeble praises of a broken lyre: 'Whose wires were golden and its heavenly air More tunable than lark to shepherd's ear, When wheat is green, when hawthorn buds appear.'" He paused, and his eye looked back over many years.