STAGE LADIES AND THE ROMANCE OF HISTORY.
“Our happy love may have a secret church,
Under the church, as Faith’s was under Paul’s,
Where we may carry on our sweet devotion,
And the cathedral marriage keep its state,
And all its decencies and ceremonies.”
Crowne, The Married Beau.
After the loose fashion of Master Crowne’s Married Beau, it was no uncommon thing for gallants once to woo the mimic ladies of the scene.
From the time that ladies first appeared upon the stage, they seem to have exercised a powerful attraction upon the cavaliers. Under date of the 18th October, 1666, Evelyn says in his Diary: “This night was acted my Lord Broghill’s tragedy, ‘Mustapha,’ before their majesties at court, at which I was present, very seldom going to the public theatres, for many reasons, now, as they are abused to an atheistical liberty, foul and undecent women now (and never till now) permitted to appear and act, who, inflaming several young noblemen and gallants, became their misses, and to some their wives; witness the Earl of Oxford, Sir R. Howard, Prince Rupert, the Earl of Dorset, and another greater person than any of them, who fell into their snares, to the reproach of their noble families, and ruin of both body and soul. I was invited by my Lord Chamberlain to see this tragedy, exceedingly well written, though in my mind I did not approve of any such pastime in a time of such judgments and calamities.”
A year and a half earlier than the date of the above entry, namely, April 3, 1665, Pepys notices the same play, with some allusions to the ladies: “To a play at the Duke’s of my Lord Orrery’s, called ‘Mustapha,’ which being not good, made Betterton’s part and Ianthe’s but ordinary too. All the pleasure of the play was, the king and my Lady Castlemaine were there; and pretty witty Nell of the King’s House, and the younger Marshall sat next us, which pleased me mightily.” The play, however, is not so poor a one as Pepys describes it, and the cast was excellent. Betterton played Solyman the Magnificent. Mustapha and Zanga, the sons of Solyman, were played by Harris and Smith; and Young made a capital Cardinal. Mrs. Betterton was the Roxalana; and Mrs. Davies, one of those ladies who, like her sisters, the two Marshalls, Hughes and Nelly, exercised the fatal attraction over young noblemen and gallants, deplored by Evelyn, was the magnificent Queen of Hungary. Mustapha continued to be the favorite play until the theatre closed, when the plague began to spread. Pepys’s “Ianthe” was Mrs. Betterton, of whom he says, on the 22d October, 1662, “the players do tell me that Betterton is not married to Ianthe, as they say; but also that he is a very sober, serious man, studious and humble, following of his studies, and is rich already with what he gets and saves.” Betterton, however, married the lady, Miss Saunderson, in 1663. She had been famous for her Ianthe in Davenant’s “Siege of Rhodes;” and she played Shakespeare’s heroines with great effect. Pepys rightly designates the author of the play, Lord Orrery. Lord Broghill was made Earl of Orrery, five years before Evelyn saw his play. I may add that Mustapha has appeared in half-a-dozen different versions on the stage. Probably the worst of these was Mallet’s; the latter author created great amusement by one of his passages, in which he said:—
“Future sultans
Have shunned the marriage tie;”—
a confusion of tenses which has been compared with a similar error in the sermons of so correct a writer as Blair (vol. v., third edition, page 224), “in future periods the light dawned more and more.”
Although Evelyn, in 1666, says that “never till now” were women admitted to assume characters on the stage, he is not quite correct in his assertion. There were actresses full thirty years previous to that period. Thus, in 1632, the “Court Beggar” was acted at the Cockpit. In the last act, Lady Strangelove says:—“If you have a short speech or two, the boy’s a pretty actor, and his mother can play her part: women-actors now grow in request.” Our ancestors wisely followed a foreign fashion when they ceased to employ boys in female characters. Prynne says, in 1633, “They have now their female players in Italy and other foreign parts;” and in Michaelmas 1629, they had French women-actors in a play personated at Blackfriars, to which there was a great resort. Geneste quotes Freshwater as writing thus of French actresses in Paris, in 1629: “Yet the women are the best actors; they play their own parts, a thing much desired in England.”
In Davenant’s patent for opening Lincoln’s-inn Fields, in 1661, permission was given for the engaging of women as actresses, on the ground that the employment of men in such parts had given great offence. I more particularly notice this matter, because it was a knight who first opened a theatre with a regular female troupe added to the usual number of male actors. Sir William’s ladies were Mrs. Davenport, Mrs. Saunderson, Mrs. Davies, Mrs. Long, Mrs. Gibbs, Mrs. Norris, Mrs. Holden, and Mrs. Jennings. The first four were Sir William’s principal actresses, and these were boarded in the knight’s own dwelling-house. Their title of “Mistress” does not necessarily imply that they were married ladies, but rather that they were old enough to be so.
This knight, too, was the first who introduced scenery on the stage. I will add (par parenthèse) that it was a priest who first suggested the levelling of the pit with the stage, for the purpose of masquerades and balls.
Prynne was not among those who fancied that morality would profit by the introduction of actresses. He had his misgivings as to the effects likely to be produced on the susceptible young gallants of his day. Touching the appearance of the French actresses at the Blackfriars Theatre, noticed above, he calls it “an impudent, shameful, un-womanish, graceless, if not more than w——ish attempt.” The fashion was, undoubtedly, first set by the court, and by no less a person than a queen. Anne of Denmark, wife of James I., acted a part in a pastoral. They who remember some of the incidents of the training she gave her son, the princely knight young Henry, will hardly think that Anne gave dignity to the occupation she temporarily assumed.
Mrs. Saunderson is said to have been the first regularly-engaged actress who opened her lips on the English stage. Had she and her compeers only half the charms which report ascribed to them, they must have afforded far more pleasure to audience and spectators than the “beautiful woman-actor,” Stephen Hamerton Hart, with his womanly dignity; Burt, with his odious female sprightliness; or Goffe, who was as hearty and bustling as old Mrs. Davenport. King Charles himself and his cavaliers, too, must have been especially delighted when they were no longer kept waiting for the commencement of a play, on the ground that the Queen was not yet shaved.
It is curious that there were some people not near so strait-laced as Prynne, who considered that public virtue would suffer shipwreck if actresses were permitted to establish themselves in the general favor. The opposite party, of course, went to an opposite extreme; and in 1672, not only were “Philaster,” and Killigrew’s “Parson’s Wedding,” played entirely by women, but one of the “Miss” Marshalls, gay daughter of a Presbyterian minister, on both occasions spoke the prologue and epilogue in male attire. “Philaster” is simply an absurd piece, which was rendered popular by Hart and Nell Gwyn; but with respect to Killigrew’s piece, it is so disgusting, from the commencement to the finale, that I can hardly fancy how any individuals, barely alive to their humanity, could be brought to utter and enact the turpitudes which Killigrew set down for them, or that an audience could be kept from fleeing from the house before the first act was over.
But the gallants could endure anything rather than a return to such effects as are alluded to by a contemporary writer, who, by way of introducing a female Desdemona, said in his prologue—
“Our women are defective and so sized
You’d think they were some of the guard disguised;
For, to speak truth, men act that are between
Forty and fifty, wenches of fifteen;
With brow so large, and nerve so uncompliant,
When you call Desdemona—enter Giant.”
Half a century elapsed before knight or gentleman took an actress from the stage, for the purpose of making her his wife. The squires, in this case, had precedence of the knights; and the antiquary, Martin Folkyes, led the way by espousing Lucretia Bradshaw, the uncorrupted amid corruption, and the original Corinna in the “Confederacy,” Dorinda in the “Beaux Stratagem,” and Arabella Zeal in the “Fair Quaker of Deal.” This marriage took place in 1713, and there was not a happier hearth in England than that of the antiquary and the actress. A knight of the Garter followed, with an earl’s coronet, and in 1735 the great Lord Peterborough acknowledged his marriage with that daughter of sweet sounds, Anastasia Robinson. This example at once flattered, provoked, and stimulated the ladies, one of whom, the daughter of Earl de Waldegrave, Lady Henrietta Herbert, married young Beard the actor. This was thought “low,” and another knight’s daughter was less censured for marrying her father’s footman. The “Beggars’ Opera” gave two coronets to two Pollys. Lavinia Fenton (Betswick), the original Polly at Lincoln’s Inn, in 1728, became Duchess of Bolton a few years later; and in 1813, no less a man than Lord Thurlow married Mary Catherine Bolton, who was scarcely an inferior Polly to the original lady, who gave up Polly to become a Bolton.
The squires once more took their turn when Sheridan married Miss Lindley; but before the last century closed, Miss Farren gave her hand to “the proudest earl in England,” the Earl of Derby, Knight of the Bath. In 1807, knight and squire took two ladies from the stage. In that year Mr. Heathcote married the beautiful Miss Searle; and Earl Craven married Louisa Brunton. We have still among us five ex-actresses who married men of the degree of noble, knight, or squire. These are Miss Stephens, the widowed Countess of Essex; Miss Foote, the widowed Countess of Harrington; Miss O’Neill the widow of Sir William Beecher, Bart.; Mrs. Nisbett, the relict of the bold Sir Felix Boothby; and Miss M. Tree, whose late husband, Mr. Bradshaw, was at one time M. P. for Canterbury.
There is something romantic in the lives of all these ladies, but most in that of “Lizzy Farren,” and as the life of that lady of a Knight of the Bath has something in common with the career of a celebrated legal knight and judge, I will take some of its incidents as the chief points in the following sketch, which is a supplementary chapter to the Romance of History, and perhaps not the least interesting one in such a series.
If gayety consists in noise, then was the market-place of Salisbury, toward the close of Christmas Eve, 1769, extremely joyous and glad. In the centre, on a raised stage, his Worship the Mayor was inaugurating the holyday-time, by having a bout at single-stick with an itinerant exhibitor of the art of self-defence from London. The “professor” had been soliciting the magisterial permission to set up his stage in the market-place, and he had not only received full license, but the chief magistrate himself condescended to take a stick and try his strength with the professor.
It was an edifying sight, and bumpkins and burgesses enjoyed it consumedly. The professional fencer allowed his adversary to count many “hits” out of pure gratitude. But he had some self-respect, and in order that his reputation might not suffer in the estimation of the spectators, he wound up the “set-to” by dealing a stroke on the right-worshipful skull, which made the mayor imagine that chaos was come again, and that all about him was dancing confusedly into annihilation.
“I am afraid I have accidentally hurt your worship’s head,” said the wickedly sympathizing single-stick player.
“H’m!” murmured the fallen great man, with a ghastly smile, and Iris’s seven hues upon his cheek, “don’t mention it: there’s nothing in it!”
“I am truly rejoiced,” replied the professor to his assistant, with a wink of the eye, “that his worship has not lost his senses.”
“Oh, ay!” exclaimed the rough aide, “he’s about as wise as ever he was.”
The single-stick player looked like Pizarro, who, when he did kill a friend occasionally—“his custom i’ th’ afternoon”—always went to the funeral in a mourning suit and a droop of the eye—intended for sympathy. In the meantime the mayor, who had been fancying himself in a balloon, and that he was being whirled away from his native town, began to think that the balloon was settling to earth again, and that the representation of chaos had been indefinitely deferred. He continued, however, holding on by the rail, as if the balloon was yet unsteady, and he only complained of a drumming in the ears.
At that moment the not-to-be-mistaken sound of a real drum fell in harsh accompaniment upon his singing-ears, and it had one good effect, that of bringing back the magistrate and the man. Both looked through the rather shaken windows of the one body, and indignation speedily lighted up from within.
The sound came from the suburb of Fisherton, but it swelled insultingly nearer and nearer, as though announcing that it was about to be beaten in the borough, despite the lack of magisterial sanction. The great depository of authority began to gaze in speechless horror, as the bearer of the noisy instrument made his appearance in the market-place at the head of a small procession, which was at once seen to consist of a party of strolling actors.
The drummer was a thick-set man, with nothing healthy looking about him but his nose, and that looked too healthy. He was the low comedian, and was naturally endowed to assume that distinctive line.
He was followed by three or four couple of “the ladies and gentlemen of the company,” of some of whom it might be said, that shoes were things they did not much stand upon. They had a shabby genteel air about them, looked hungry and happy; and one or two wore one hand in the pocket, upon an economizing principle in reference to gloves. The light comedian cut jokes with the spectators, and was soon invited to the consequence he aimed at—an invitation to “take a glass of wine.” The women were more tawdry-looking than the men, but they wore a light-hearted, romping aspect—all, except the young lady who played Ophelia and Columbine, who carried a baby, and looked as if she had not been asleep since it was born, which was probably the case.
The cortège was closed by a fine, gentleman-like man, who led by the hand a little girl some ten years old. No one could look for a moment at them, without at once feeling assured that there was something in them which placed them above the fellows with whom they consorted. They were father and daughter. He manager; she a species of infant phenomenon. In his face were to be traced the furrows of disappointment, and in his eye the gleam of hope. Her face was as faces of the young should ever be, full of enjoyment, love, and feeling. The last two were especially there for the father, whose hand she held, and into whose face she looked, ever and anon, with a smile which never failed to be repaid in similar currency.
The refined air of the father, and the graceful bearing of the modest daughter, won commendations from all beholders. He was an ex-surgeon of Cork, who had given up his profession in order to follow the stage. People set him down as insane, and so he was, but it was an insanity which made a countess of his daughter. His name was Farren, and his child, pet daughter of a pretty mother, was the inimitable Lizzy.
If the mayor could have read into history, he would have knelt down and kissed Lizzy Farren’s shoe-buckles. As he could not so read, he only saw in the sire a vagabond, and in the child a mountebank. On the former he hurled down the whole weight of his magisterial wrath. It was in vain that the manager declared he was on his way to solicit the mayor’s license to act in Salisbury. That official gentleman declared that it was an infraction of the law to pass from the suburb of Fisherton into the borough of Salisbury before the mayor’s permission had been previously signified.
“And that permission I will never give,” said his worship. “We are a godly people here, and have no taste for rascal-players. As his majesty’s representative, I am bound to encourage no amusements that are not respectable.”
“But our young king,” interrupted Mr. Farren, “is himself a great patron of the theatre.”
This was worse than a heavy blow at single-stick; and the mayor was the more wrath as he had no argument ready to meet it. After looking angry for a moment, a bright thought struck him.
“Ay, ay, sir! You will not, I hope, teach a mayor either fact or duty. We know, sir, what the king (God bless him!) patronizes. His majesty does not patronize strollers. He goes regularly to an established church, sir, and to an established theatre; and so, sir, I, as mayor, support only establishments. Good heavens! what would become of the throne and the altar, if a Mayor of Sarum were to do otherwise?”
As Mr. Farren did not well know, he could not readily tell; and as he stood mute, the mayor continued to pour down upon the player and his vocation, a shower of obloquy. At every allusion which he made to his predilection for amusements that were respectable and instructive, the single-stick player and his man drew themselves up, cried “Hear! hear!” and looked down upon the actors with an air of burlesque contempt. The actors, men and women, returned the look with a burst of uncontrollable laughter. The mayor took this for deliberate insult, aimed at himself and at what he chose to patronize. His protégés looked the more proud, and became louder than ever in their self-applauding “Hear! hear!” The players, the while, shrieked with laughter. Even Mr. Farren and Lizzy could not refrain from risibility, for the stick-player and his man were really members of the company. The former was Mr. Frederick Fitzmontague, who was great in Hamlet. His man was the ruffian in melodramas, and the clown in pantomimes, and as he did a little private business of his own by accepting an engagement from a religious society, during the dull season of the year, to preach on the highways against theatricals, Mr. Osmond Brontere was usually known by the cognomen of Missionary Jack.
The magisterial refusal to license this wandering company to play in Salisbury, was followed by altercation; and altercation by riot. The multitude took part with the actors, and they hooted the mayor; and the latter, viewing poor Farren as the cause and guilty mover of all that had occurred, summarily ordered his arrest; and, in spite of all remonstrance, resistance, or loudly-expressed disgust, the manager was ultimately lodged in the cage. The mob, then, satisfied at having had a little excitement, and caring nothing more about the matter, at length separated, and repaired to their respective homes. They went all the quicker that the rain had begun to descend in torrents; and they took little notice of poor Lizzy, who went home in the dusk, weeping bitterly, and led by the hands of the matronly Ophelia and Missionary Jack.
Ere morning dawned, a change had come over the scene. The rain had ceased. A hard frost had set in. All Salisbury looked as if it were built upon a frozen lake. The market-place itself was a mer de glace. Christmas-day was scarcely visible when a boy of early habits, standing at the door of an upholsterer’s shop, which bore above it the name of Burroughs, fancied he saw something moving with stealthy pace across the market-place; and he amused himself by watching it through the gloom. It was developed, after a while, into the figure of a thinly-clad girl, bearing in her arms a bowl of hot milk. She trod cautiously, and looked, now down at her feet, now across the wide square, to measure the distance she had yet to go. Each little foot was put forward with hesitation, and so slowly was progress made, that there was good chance of the boiling milk being frozen, before it had been carried half-way to its destination.
The girl was Lizzy Farren, and in the bowl, which between her arms looked as graceful as urn clasped by Arcadian nymph, lay the chief portion of a breakfast destined, on this sad Christmas morning, for her captive sire in the cage.
“She’ll be down!” said young Burroughs, as he saw her partially slip. Lizzy, however, recovered herself; but so alarmed was she at her situation, so terrified when she measured the distance she had to accomplish by that which she had already traversed, that she fairly stood still near the centre of the market-place, and wept aloud over the hot bowl and her cold position. It was then that the young knight recognised the crisis when he was authorized to interfere. He made a run from the door, shot one leg in advance, drew the other quickly after him, and went sliding, with express-train speed, close up to Lizzy’s feet. She no sooner saw the direful prospect of collision than she shrieked with an energy which roused all the rooks in the close.
“Hold hard!” exclaimed the merry-faced boy; “hold hard! that’s myself, you Lizzy, and the milk. Hold hard!” he continued, as he half held her up, half held on to her. “Hold hard! or we shall all be down together.”
“Oh, where do you come from? and how do you know my name is Lizzy?”
“Well! Mr. Fitzmontague lodges in our house, and he told us all about you, last night. And he said, as sure as could be, you would be awake before anybody in Salisbury. And sure enough, here you are, almost before daylight.”
By the help of the young cavalier, the distressed damsel was relieved from her perplexity. Young Burroughs offered to carry the bowl, which she stoutly refused. “No one,” she said, “shall carry my father’s breakfast to him, but myself, on such a morning.” And so, her deliverer walked tenderly by her side, holding her cautiously up, nor ceased from his care, until Lizzy and her burden had safely reached the cage. Through the bars of the small window, Farren had watched her coming; and he hailed her arrival with a “God bless you, my own child!”
“Oh, papa!” said Lizzy, weeping again, and embracing the bowl as warmly as if it had been her father himself; “oh, papa! what would mamma and my little sisters, and all our friends in Liverpool say, if they knew how we are beginning our Christmas day?”
“Things unknown are unfelt, my darling. We will tell them nothing about it, till Fortune gilds over the memory of it. But what do you bring, Lizzy?—or rather, why do I ask? It is my breakfast; and Lizzy herself has had none.”
A pretty altercation ensued; but Lizzy gained her point; and not one drop would she taste till her sire had commenced the repast. Aided by young Burroughs, she held the lip of the bowl through the bars of the cage; and the little English maiden smiled, for the first time since yesterday, at beholding her sire imbibe the quickening draught. It was not till three years after that Barry and his wife played Evander and Euphrasia in the Grecian Daughter, or Farren would have drawn a parallel suitable to the occasion. He was not so well up in history as in theatricals; and on the stage, history has a terrible time of it. Witness this very tragedy in which Murphy has made Evander, King of Sicily, and confounded Dionysius the elder, with his younger namesake. To be sure, pleasant Palmer, who played the character, was about as wise as Murphy.
When the primitive breakfast was concluded, Lizzy stood sad and silent; and the father sadly and silently looked down at her; while young Burroughs leaned against the wall, as sad and silent as either of them. And so a weary two hours passed; at the end of which, a town-constable appeared, accompanied by a clerical gentleman, and empowered to give liberty to the captive. When the constable told the manager that his liberation was owing to the intercession made in his behalf, by the Reverend Mr. Snodgrass, who had just arrived in Salisbury, Lizzy clapped her hands with agitation, for she saw that the clerical interceder was no other than Missionary Jack. “Oh, Mr. Brontere,” said the curious girl, when they had all reached home together, “how did you ever manage it?”
“Well!” said the enterprising actor, with a laugh; “I called on his worship, to inquire what Christmas charities might be acceptable; and if there were any prisoners whom my humble means might liberate. He named your papa, and the company have paid what was necessary. His worship was not inexorable, particularly as I incidentally told him his Majesty patronized, the other day, an itinerant company at Datchet. As for how I did it. I rather think I am irresistible in the dress in which poor Will Havard, only two years ago, played ‘Old Adam.’ A little ingenuity, as you see, has made it look very like a rector’s costume; and, besides,” said Missionary Jack, “I sometimes think that nature intended me for the church.”
******
Three years had elapsed. On the Christmas eve of 1772, all the play-going people of Wakefield were in a state of pleasant excitement, at the promise made in bills posted over the town announcing the immediate appearance of the “Young Queen of Columbines.” All the young bachelors of the town were besieging the box-office. In those days there were not only theatres in provincial towns, but people really went to them. Amid the applicants, was a sprightly-looking articled clerk, who, having achieved his object, had stopped for a moment at the stage-door to read the programme of the forthcoming pantomime. While thus engaged the Columbine Queen, the most fairy-looking of youthful figures, brilliant as spring, and light as gossamer, sweet fifteen, with a look of being a year or two more, tripped into the street, on her way home from rehearsal. Eighty years ago the gallantry of country towns, with respect to pretty actresses, was much like that which characterizes German localities now. It was of a rudely enthusiastic quality. Accordingly, the fairy-looking Columbine had hardly proceeded a dozen yards, when she had twice as many offers made her of arms, whereon to find support over the slippery pavement. It was an old-fashioned winter in Wakefield, and Columbine’s suitors had as many falls in the course of their assiduities, as though they had been so many “Lovers” in the pantomime, and the wand of Harlequin was tripping them up as they skipped along. Columbine got skilfully rid of them all in time, except one; and he became at last so unwelcomely intrusive, that the articled clerk, who was the very champion of distressed damsels, and had been a watcher of what was going on, went up to the young lady, took her arm in his, without any ceremony, and bade her persecutor proceed any further, at his peril. The gentleman took the hint, and left knight and lady to continue their way unmolested. They no sooner saw themselves alone, when, looking into each other’s faces, they laughed a merry laugh of recognition, and it would be difficult to say which was the merrier—Miss Farren or Mr. Burroughs, the young actress and the incipient lawyer.
When boxing-night came, there was a crowded house, and Lizzy created a furore. Like Carlotta Grisi, she could sing as well as dance, and there was a bright intellect, to boot, pervading all she did. On the night in question, she sang between the acts; and young Burroughs, ever watchful, especially marked the effect of her singing upon a very ecstatic amateur who was seated next to him. “What a treasure,” said the amateur, “would this girl be in Liverpool!” “Well,” remarked Burroughs, “I am ready to accept an engagement for her. State your terms. Thirty shillings a-week, I presume, will not quite exhaust your treasury.” “I will certainly,” said the stranger, “tell our manager, Younger, of the prize which is to be acquired so cheaply; and the affair need not be delayed; for Younger is at the Swan, and will be down here to-night, to see the pantomime.”
In five minutes, Burroughs was sitting face-to-face with Younger at the inn, urging him to go at once, not to see Columbine dance, but to hear her sing. “I wonder,” said the manager, “if your young friend is the child of the Cork surgeon who married the daughter of Wright, the Liverpool brewer. If so, she’s clever; besides, why——”
“Why she’ll make your fortune,” said the lawyer’s clerk. “She is the grand-daughter of your Liverpool brewer, sings like a nightingale, and is worth five pounds a week to you at least. Come and hear her.”
Younger walked leisurely down, as if he was in no particular want of talent; but he was so pleased with what he did hear that when the songstress came off the stage, Burroughs went round and exultingly announced that he had procured an engagement for her at Liverpool, at two pounds ten per week; and to find her own satin shoes and silk stockings. In prospect of such a Potosi, the Columbine danced that night as boundingly as if Dan Mercury had lent her the very pinions from his heels.
“Mr. Burroughs,” said Lizzy, as he was escorting her and her mother home, “this is the second Christmas you have made happy for us. I hope you may live to be Lord Chief Justice.”
“Thank you, Lizzy, that is about as likely as that Liverpool will make of the Wakefield Columbine a countess.”
******
A few years had again passed away since the Christmas week which succeeded that spent at Wakefield, and which saw Lizzy Farren the only Rosetta which Liverpool cared to listen to, and it was now the same joyous season, but the locality was Chester.
There was a custom then prevailing among actors, which exists nowhere now, except in some of the small towns in Germany. Thus, not very long ago, at Ischl, in Austria, I was surprised to see a very pretty actress enter my own room at the inn, and putting a play-bill into my hand, solicit my presence at her benefit. This was a common practice in the north of England till Tate Wilkinson put an end to it, as derogatory to the profession. The custom, however, had not been checked at the time and in the locality to which I have alluded. On the Christmas eve of the period in question, Lizzy Farren was herself engaged in distributing her bills, and asking patronage for her benefit, which was to take place on the following Twelfth Night. As appropriate to the occasion she had chosen Shakespeare’s comedy of that name, and was to play Viola, a part for which Younger, who loved her heartily, had given her especial instruction.
Miss Farren had not been very successful in her “touting.” She had been unlucky in the two families at whose houses she had ventured to knock. The first was that of an ex-proprietor of a religious periodical, who had a horror of the stage, but who had a so much greater horror of Romanism, that, like the Scottish clergy of the time, he would have gone every night to the play during Passion week, only to show his abhorrence of popery. This pious scoundrel had grown rich by swindling his editors and supporting any question which paid best. His household he kept for years, by inserting advertisements in his journal for which he was paid in kind. He was a slimy, sneaking, mendacious knave, who would have advocated atheism if he could have procured a dozen additional subscribers by it. His lady was the quintessence of vulgarity and malignity. She wore diamonds on her wig, venom in her heart, and very-much-abused English at the end of her tongue.
Poor Lizzy, rebuffed here, rang at the garden-gate of Mrs. Penury Beaugawg. She was a lady of sentiment who drank, a lady of simplicity who rouged, a lady of affected honesty who lived beyond her income, and toadied or bullied her relations into paying her debts. Mrs. Penury Beaugawg would have graciously accepted orders for a private box; but a patronage which cost her anything, was a vulgarity which her gentle and generous spirit could not comprehend.
Lizzy was standing dispirited in the road at the front of the house, when a horseman rode slowly up; and Lizzy, not at all abashed at practising an old but not agreeable custom, raised a bill to his hand as he came close to her, and solicited half-a-crown, the regular admission-price to the boxes.
“Lizzy!” cried the horseman, “you shall have such a house at Chester, as the old town has not seen since the night Garrick was here, and played Richard and Lord Chalkstone.”
The equestrian was Mr. Burroughs, then in training for the bar, and as willing to help Miss Farren now as he was to aid her and her bowl of milk across the market-place at Salisbury. The incipient barrister kept his word. The Chester theatre was crammed to the ceiling; and, as Lizzy said, Mr. Burroughs was her Christmas angel, the thought of whom was always associated in her mind with plumbs, currants, holly——
“And mistletoe,” said the budding counsellor, with a look at which both laughed merrily and honestly.
On the Christmas eve of 1776, Miss Farren was seated in Colman’s parlor in London, looking at him while he read two letters of introduction; one from Burroughs, the other from Younger; and both in high praise of the young bearer, for whom they were especially written. My limits will only allow me to say that Lizzy was engaged for the next summer-season at the Haymarket, where she appeared on June 9, 1777, in “She Stoops to Conquer.” She was Miss Hardcastle, and Edwin made his first appearance in London with her, in the same piece. Colman would have brought out Henderson too, if he could have managed it. That dignified gentleman, however, insisted on reserving his début for Shylock, on the 11th of the same month. And what a joyous season did Lizzy make of it for our then youthful grandfathers. How they admired her double talent in Miss Hardcastle! How ecstatic were they with her Maria, in the “Citizen!” How ravishedly did they listen to her Rosetta! How they laughed at her Miss Tittup, in “Bon Ton!” and how they extolled her playfulness and dignity as Rosina, of which she was the original representative, in the “Barber of Seville!” It may be remarked that Colman omitted the most comic scene in the piece, that wherein the Count is disguised as a drunken trooper—as injurious to morality!
When, in the following year, she played Lady Townley, she was declared the first, and she was then almost the youngest of living actresses. And when she joined the Drury Lane company in the succeeding season, the principal parts were divided between herself, Miss Walpole, Miss P. Hopkins, and Perdita Robinson. Not one of this body was then quite twenty years of age! Is not this a case wherein to exclaim—
“O mihi præteritos referat si Jupiter annos?”
Just twenty years did she adorn our stage; ultimately taking leave of it at Drury Lane, in April, 1797, in the character of Lady Teazle. Before that time, however, she had been prominent in the Christmas private plays at the Duke of Richmond’s, in which the Earl of Derby, Lord Henry Fitzgerald, and the Honorable Mrs. Dormer acted with her; and that rising barrister, Mr. Burroughs, looking constantly at the judicial bench as his own proper stage, was among the most admiring of the audience. It was there that was formed that attachment which ultimately made of her, a month after she had retired from the stage, Countess of Derby, and subsequently mother of a future countess, who still wears her coronet.
Not long after this period, and following on her presentation at Court, where she was received with marked kindly condescension by Queen Charlotte, the countess was walking in the marriage procession of the Princess Royal and the Duke of Wurtemberg; her foot caught in the carpeting, and she would have fallen to the ground, but for the ready arms, once more extended to support her, of Mr. Burroughs, now an eminent man indeed.
Many years had been added to the roll of time, when a carriage, containing a lady was on its way to Windsor. It suddenly came to a stop, by the breaking of an axle-tree. In the midst of the distress which ensued to the occupier, a second carriage approached, bearing a goodnatured-looking gentleman, who at once offered his services. The lady, recognising an old friend, accepted the offer with alacrity. As the two drove off together in the gentleman’s carriage toward Windsor, the owner of it remarked that he had almost expected to find her in distress on the road; for it was Christmas Eve, and he had been thinking of old times.
“How many years is it, my lady countess,” said he, “since I stood at my father’s shop-door in Salisbury, watching your perilous passage over the market-place, with a bowl of milk?”
“Not so long at all events,” she answered with a smile, “but that I recollect my poor father would have lost his breakfast, but for your assistance.”
“The time is not long for memory,” replied the Judge, “nor is Salisbury as far from Windsor as Dan from Beersheba; yet how wide the distance between the breakfast at the cage-door at Salisbury, and the Christmas dinner to which we are both proceeding, in the palace of the king!”
“The earl is already there,” added the countess, “and he will be happier than the king himself to welcome the legal knight who has done such willing service to the Lady of the Knight of the Bath.”
To those whose power and privilege it is to create such knights, we will now direct our attention, and see how kings themselves behaved in their character as knights.