Mrs Elizabeth, an English actress, dramatic author, and novelist, was the daughter of a farmer, and was born in 1753 at Standingfield, near Bury St Edmunds, in Suffolk. She lost her father at an early age, and her mother, a giddy and foolish woman, was too gay to take any care of her upbringing. Tired of the dull routine of a country-life, Miss Simpson conceived the idea of running away from home, and seeking fortune, and perhaps fame, on the stage. She arrived in London with a few shillings of money, a small bundle of clothes, and a great store of trashy romance in her head. In the course of her various adventures she made acquaintance with some of the directors and actors of the London theatres, but sought in vain to be admitted into any of their companies. Recounting her rebuffs, and the dangers of her position, to Mr Inchbald, one of the comedians of Drury-Lane, she so touched him by the narrative that he offered her his hand. There was a great disparity of years between them, but their union was perfectly happy. Inchbald trained her to the stage, and acted with her in the provincial theatres of England, and afterwards for four years in Edinburgh, with great applause. On his death in 1778, she began to write for the stage, to which she bade adieu as an actress in 1789. The success of her dramatic pieces, and the strict economy of her life, soon made her independent of the world; and her prudence, virtue, and refined manners, opened up to her all but the highest grades of the social scale. Her frugal habits remained with her to the last; and she denied herself many of the comforts of life in order that her invalid sister might want none of its luxuries. Some of the entries in her journal prove that she was not above a few of the little weaknesses of her sex. In her youth she had possessed a rare beauty, and in her diary she sometimes laments the effects of increasing years. One extract will serve as a sample: "1798. London. Rehearsing Lover's Vows; happy, but for a suspicion, amounting to a certainty, of a rapid appearance of age on my face." She died at Kensington, Aug. 1, 1821, in the sixty-ninth year of her age. Shortly before her death it became known that she had written the history of her chequered career, and she was offered L1,000 for the MS., which was with good reason believed to be both interesting and valuable. She refused the offer, however, and let strict orders that it should be destroyed after her death; and her orders were obeyed. The loss, however, was to some extent compensated by the publication in 1833 of her Memoirs, compiled chiefly from an autograph journal which she had kept for about 50 years. This work is one of the most interesting of its class.

Mrs Inchbald's plays amounted to nineteen in all. Some of them were very successful; and one of them, *Wives as they were*, and *Maids as they are*, still keeps the stage. Of far higher merit, however, as a work of art, is her *Such things are*; and scarcely inferior are, *The Married Man*, *The Wedding Day*, *The Midnight Hour*, *Every one has his Fault*; and *Lover's Vows*. In a literary point of view, these plays are thrown into the shade by her two novels, *A Simple Story*, 1791; and *Nature and Art*, 1796. These two works rank among the happiest productions of the Inchbald female pen; and charm both by their views of life and sketches of character, their simple truth and naturalness, the high and pure moral which they teach, and the easy grace and lightness of their style. They have both been translated into French.