Directing our steps to the left, or westward, we again reach the river
at the town of Hampton. It is possessed of pretty water-views, but of
little else of note except the memory and the house of Garrick.
Hither the great actor, after positively his last night on the stage,
retired, and settled the long contest for his favor between the Muses
of Tragedy and Comedy by inexorably turning his back on both. He
did not cease to be the delight of polished society, thanks to his
geniality and to literary and conversational powers capable of making
him the intimate of Johnson and Reynolds. More fortunate in his
temperament and temper than his modern successor, Macready, he never
fretted that his profession made him a vagabond by act of Parliament,
or that his adoption of it in place of the law had prevented his
becoming, by virtue of the same formal and supreme stamp, the equal
of the Sampson Brasses plentiful in his day as in ours among their
betters of that honorable vocation. His self-respect was of tougher if
not sounder grain. "Worth makes the man, and want of it the fellow,"
was the motto supplied him by his friend and neighbor, Pope, but
obeyed long before he saw it in the poetic form.
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