_ The White Lady of Avenel, I suppose?--You have told the
very story before.
_Author._ No--I beheld a female form, with mob-cap, bib, and apron,
sleeves tucked up to the elbow, a dredging-box in the one hand, and in
the other a sauce-ladle. I concluded, of course, that it was my
friend's cook-maid walking in her sleep; and as I knew he had a value
for Sally, who could toss a pancake with any girl in the country, I
got up to conduct her safely to the door. But as I approached her, she
said,--"Hold, sir! I am not what you take me for;"--words which seemed
so opposite to the circumstances, that I should not have much minded
them, had it not been for the peculiarly hollow sound in which they
were uttered.--"Know, then," she said, in the same unearthly accents,
"that I am the spirit of Betty Barnes."--"Who hanged herself for love
of the stage-coachman," thought I; "this is a proper spot of work!"--
"Of that unhappy Elizabeth or Betty Barnes, long cook-maid to Mr.
Warburton, the painful collector, but ah! the too careless custodier,
of the largest collection of ancient plays ever known--of most of
which the titles only are left to gladden the Prolegomena of the
Variorum Shakspeare. Yes, stranger, it was these ill-fated hands That
consigned to grease and conflagration the scores of small quartos,
which, did they now exist, would drive the whole Roxburghe Club out of
their senses--it was these unhappy pickers and stealers that singed
fat fowls and wiped dirty trenchers with the lost works of Beaumont
and Fletcher, Massinger, Jonson, Webster--what shall I say?--even of
Shakspeare himself!"
Like every dramatic antiquary, my ardent curiosity after some play
named in the Book of the Master of Revels, had often been checked by
finding the object of my research numbered amongst the holocaust of
victims which this unhappy woman had sacrificed to the God of Good
Cheer.
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