THE LAST DAYS OF SAUCY KITTY CLIVE.

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 1515, 15 January 1886, Page 4

THE LAST DAYS OF SAUCY KITTY CLIVE.

Time went by, dealing gently with saucy Kitty Give, ller chief delight during her later years lay in cards, and there were few nights in the year she did not give or attend card parties. In 1777 her face rising on Strawberry Hill, no longer made it sultry. " I assure you," writes Walpole to the Countess of Ossory, " you may sit now in her beams when she is in her zenith without being tanned." Five years later he chronicle* the fact, " poor Mrr Clive is certainly very declining ;" but during the next year she was able to come to town to see the great Mrs Siddons act. When at the close of the performance she was asked what she thought of this famous woman's playing, she answered —" Think— I think it's all truth and daylight." In the December of 17b-5 the curtain fell upon the blameless life of saucy Kitty Give. How the end came her friend Horace Waipoles words shall tell. " My poor old friend, Mrs Give is a great loss," he writes, " but it did not much surprise me, and the manner comforts me. I bad played at cards with her at Mrs Goatling's three nights before I came to town, aDd found her extremely confused, and not knowing what she did ; indeed, I perceived something of the sort before, and had found her much broken in the autumn. It seems that the day after I saw her she went to General Lister's burial and got cold, and had been ill for two or three days. On the Wednesday morning she rose to have her bed made, and while sitting on the bed with her maid beside her, sunk down at once and died without a pang or a groan. She had reached the seventyfourth year of her age.