—Cooke alluded to him in his diary, for 1811, thus: ‘I was visited by Master Payne, the American Young Roscius; I thought him a polite, sensible youth, and the reverse of our Young Roscius.’ This was an ebullition of irritability. Even those who could not praise Roscius as a tenth wonder, acknowledged his courtesy and were struck by his good common sense. Boaden, who makes the singular remark that ‘all the favouritism, and more than the innocence, of former patronesses was lavished on him,’ also tells us more intelligibly, that Master Betty ‘never lost the genuine modesty of his carriage; and his temper, at least, was as steady as his diligence.’ One actor said, ‘Among clever boys he would have been a Triton among minnows;’ but Mrs. Inchbald remarked, ‘Had I never seen boys act, I might have thought him extraordinary.’ ‘Baby-faced child!’ said Campbell. ‘Handsome face! graceful figure! marvellous power!’ is the testimony of Mrs. Mathews. The most unbiassed judgment I can find is Miss Seward’s, who wrote thus of him in 1804, after seeing him as Osman in ‘Zara’: ‘It could not have been conceived or represented with more grace, sensibility, and fire, though he is veritably an effeminate boy of thirteen; but his features are cast in a diminutive mould, particularly his nose and mouth. This circumstance must at every period of life be injurious to stage effect; nor do I think his ear for blank verse faultless. Like Cooke, he never fails to give the passions their whole force, by gesture and action natural and just; but he does not do equal justice to the harmony. It is, I think, superfluous to look forward to the mature fruit of this luxuriant blossom.’ Miss Seward was right; but she was less correct in her prophecy, ‘He will not live to bear it. Energies various and violent will blast in no short time the vital powers, evidently delicate.’ He survived this prophecy just seventy years! One other opinion of him I cannot forbear adding. It is Elliston’s, and it is in the very loftiest of Robert William’s manner, who was born a little more than one hundred years ago! ‘Sir, my opinion of the young gentleman’s talents will never transpire during my life. I have written my convictions down. They have been attested by competent witnesses, and sealed and deposited in the iron safe at my banker’s, to be drawn forth and opened, with other important documents, at my death. The world will then know what Mr. Elliston thought of Master Betty!’
The Young Roscius withdrew from the stage and entered Christ’s College, Cambridge. He there enjoyed quiet study and luxurious seclusion. Meanwhile that once boy with the flashing eyes, Edmund Kean, had got a modest post at the Haymarket, where he played Rosencrantz to Mr. Rae’s Hamlet. He had also struggled his way to Belfast, and had acted Osman to Mrs. Siddons’ Zara. ‘He plays well, very well,’ said the lady: ‘but there is too little of him to make a great actor.’ Edmund, too, had married ‘Mary Chambers,’ at Stroud, and Mr. Beverley had turned the young couple out of his company, ‘to teach them not to do it again!’ In 1812, ‘Mr. Betty,’ come to man’s estate, returned to the stage, at Bath. A few months previously Mr. and Mrs. Kean were wandering from town to town. In rooms, to which the public were invited by written bills, in Kean’s hand, they recited scenes from plays and sang duets; and he trilled songs, spoke soliloquies, danced hornpipes, and gave imitations!—and starved, and hoped—and would by no means despair.
Mr. Betty’s second career lasted from 1812 to 1824, when he made his last bow at Southampton, as the Earl of Warwick. Within the above period he acted at Covent Garden, in 1812 and 1813. He proved to be a highly ‘respectable’ actor; but the phenomenon no longer existed. His last performance in London was in June 1813, when he played ‘Richard III.’ and ‘Tristram Fickle’ for his benefit. In the following January Edmund Kean, three years his senior, took the town by storm in Shylock, and made his conquest good by his incomparable Richard. The genius of Mr. Betty left him with his youth. Edmund Kean drowned his genius in wine and rioting before his manhood was matured. Forty-eight years have elapsed since he was carried to his grave in Richmond churchyard. Honoured and regretted, all that was mortal of the once highly-gifted boy, who lived to be a venerable and much-loved old man, ‘fourscore years and upwards,’ was borne to his last resting-place in the cemetery at Highgate. Requiescat in pace!
CHARLES YOUNG AND HIS TIMES.
Charles Mayne Young, one of the last of the school of noble actors, has found a biographer in his son, the Rev. Julian Young, Rector of Ilmington. Here we have stage and pulpit in happy and not unusual propinquity. There was a time when the clergy had the drama entirely to themselves; they were actors, authors, and managers. The earliest of them all retired to the monastery of St. Alban, after his theatre at Dunstable had been burnt down, at the close of a squib-and-rocket sort of drama on the subject of St. Theresa. At the Reformation the stage became secularised, the old moralities died out, and the new men and pieces were denounced as wicked by the ‘unco righteous’ among their dramatic clerical predecessors. Nevertheless, the oldest comedy of worldly manners we possess—‘Ralph Roister Doister’—was the work of the Rev. Dr. Nicholas Udall, in 1540. During the three centuries and nearly a half which have elapsed since that time, clergymen have ranked among the best writers for the stage. The two most successful tragedies of the last century were the Rev. Dr. Young’s ‘Revenge,’ and the Rev. J. Home’s ‘Douglas.’ In the present century few comedies have made such a sensation as the Rev. Dr. Croly’s ‘Pride shall have a Fall,’ but the sensation was temporary, the comedy only illustrating local and contemporary incidents.
A dozen other ‘Reverends’ might be cited who have more or less adorned dramatic literature, and there are many instances of dramatic artists whose sons or less near kinsmen having taken orders in the Church. When Sutton, in the pulpit of St. Mary Overy, A.D. 1616, denounced the stage, Nathaniel Field, the eminent actor, published a letter to the preacher, in which Field said that in the player’s trade there were corruptions as there were in all others; he implied, as Overbury implied, that the actor was not to be judged by the dross of the craft, but by the purer metal. Field anticipated Fielding’s Newgate Chaplain, who upheld ‘Punch’ on the same ground that the comedian upheld the stage—that it was nowhere spoken against in Scripture! The year 1616 was the year in which Shakespeare died. It is commonly said that the players of Shakespeare’s time were of inferior birth and culture, but Shakespeare himself was of a well-conditioned family, and this Nathaniel Field who stood up for the honour of the stage against the censure of the pulpit, had for brother that Rev. Theophilus Field who was successively Bishop of Llandaff, St. David’s, and Hereford. Charles Young was not the only actor of his day who gave a son to the Church. His old stage-manager at Bath, Mr. Charlton, saw not only his son but his grandsons usefully employed in the more serious vocation. As for sons of actors at the universities, they have seldom been wanting, from William Hemming (son of John Hemming, the actor, and joint-editor with Condell of the folio edition of Shakespeare’s Works), who took his degree at Oxford in 1628, down to Julian Charles Young, son of the great tragedian, who took his degree in the same university two centuries later; or, to be precise, A.D. 1827.
Charles Mayne Young, who owed his second name to the circumstance of his descent from the regicide who was so called, was born in Fenchurch Street, in 1777. His father was an able surgeon and a reckless spendthrift. Before the household fell into ruin, Charles Young had passed a holiday year, partly at the Court of Copenhagen. He had seen a boy with flashing eyes play bits from Shakespeare before the guests at his father’s table—a strolling, fantastically-dressed, intellectual boy, whose name was Edmund Kean. Further, Charles Young saw and appreciated, at the age of twelve, Mrs. Siddons as the mother of Coriolanus. He also passed through Eton and Merchant Taylors’. When the surgeon’s household was broken up, and Young and his two brothers took their ill-used mother to their own keeping, they adopted various courses for her and their own support, and all of them succeeded. Charles Young, after passing a restless novitiate in a merchant’s office (the more restless, probably, as he thought of two personages—the bright, gipsy-looking boy who had acted in his father’s dining-room, and the Volumnia of Mrs. Siddons, as she triumphed in the tragedy of Coriolanus), went upon the stage, triumphed in his turn, and assumed the sole guardianship and support of the mother he loved.
Young’s father was a remarkably detestable person. He never seems to have forgiven his sons for the affection which they manifested towards their mother. After the separation of the parents, George Young, the eldest son, was in a stage-coach going to Hackney; on the road, a stranger got in, took the only vacant seat, and, on seeing George Young opposite to him, struck him a violent blow in the face. George quietly called to the coachman to stop, and without exchanging a word with the stranger, got out, to the amazement of the other passengers. But, as he closed the door, he looked in and simply said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, that is my father!’ In 1807, when Charles Young made his first appearance in London, at the Haymarket, as Hamlet, his father sat ensconced in a corner of the house, and hissed him! Neither the blow nor the hiss did more than momentarily wound the feelings of the sons.