complete actress" proved so true in relation to Mrs. Pritchard that she was seen to fresh admiration till in advanced age she retired with a fortune. She was held the greatest Lady Macbeth of her day (until Sarah Siddons took over the role and redefined Shakespearean theatre), her scene with the ghost being especially admired. The Queen in Hamlet, Estifania, and Doll Common were also among her greatest parts. Leigh Hunt is convinced that she was a really great genius, equally capable of the highest and lowest parts. Charles Churchill praises her highly in the Rosciad, especially as the Jealous Wife. Horace Walpole, who knew and admired her, praises her Maria in the Nonjuror, and her Beatrice, which he preferred to Miss Farren's, and would not allow his Mysterious Mother to be played after her retirement from the stage, as she alone could have presented the Countess. Mrs. Pritchard had, however, an imperfect education, and other critics give less favourable accounts of her. On one occasion Johnson declared her good but affected in her manner; another time he calls her "a mechanical player". In private life he declared she was "a vulgar idiot; she would talk of her gownd, but when she appeared upon the stage seemed to be inspired by gentility and understanding". "It is wonderful how little mind she had", he once said, affirming she had never read the tragedy of Macbeth all through. "She no more thought of the play out of which her part was taken than a shoemaker thinks of the skin out of which the piece of leather out of which he is making a pair of shoes is cut". Campbell, who could not have seen her, says in his Life of Siddons, unjustly, that something of her Bartholomew Fair origin may be traced in her professional characteristics, declares that she "never rose to the finest grade, even of comedy, but was most famous in scolds and viragos"; adds that in tragedy, though she "had a large imposing manner" (in fact, like her daughter, she was small), "she wanted grace", and says that Garrick told Tate Wilkinson that she was "apt to blubber her sorrows". Most of this condemnation is an over-accentuation of faults indicated by Davies. Francis Hayman painted her twice – once separately, and again (as Clarinda), with Garrick as Ranger, in a scene from Hoadley's Suspicious Husband. Johann Zoffany represented her