Before Young came up to London, he had seen some of the sunshine and some of the bitterness of life. He married the young, beautiful, and noble woman and actress, Julia Grimani. They had a brief, joyous, married time of little more than a year, when the birth of a son was the death of the mother. For the half-century that Young survived her no blandishment of woman ever led him to be untrue to her memory. To look with tears on her miniature-portrait, to touch tenderly some clustered locks of her hair, to murmur some affectionate word of praise, and, finally, to thank God that he should soon be with her, showed how young heart-feelings had survived in old heart-memories.

Charles Young adorned the English stage from 1807 to 1832. Because he acted with the Kembles he is sometimes described as being of the Kemble school. In a great theatre the leading player is often imitated throughout the house. There was a time when everybody employed at Drury Lane seemed a double of Mr. Macready. Charles Young, however, was an original actor. It took him but five years to show that he was equal in some characters to John Kemble himself. This was seen in 1812, in his Cassius to Kemble’s Brutus. On that occasion Terry is said to have been the Casca—a part which was really played by Fawcett. About ten years later, Young left the Covent Garden company and 25l. a week, for Drury Lane and 50l. a night, to play in the same pieces with Kean. The salary proved that the manager thought him equal in attractiveness to Kean; and Kean was, undoubtedly, somewhat afraid of him. Young’s secession was as great a loss to the company he had been acting with, as Compton’s has been to the Haymarket company. In both cases, a perfect artist withdrew from the brotherhood.

Young was fifteen years upon the London stage before he could free himself from nervousness—nervousness, not merely like that of Mrs. Siddons, before going on, but when fairly in face of the audience. In 1826, he told Moore, at a dinner of the Anacreontics, that any close observer of his acting must have been conscious of a great improvement therein, dating from the previous four years. That is to say, dating from the time when he first played in the same piece with Edmund Kean. The encounter with that great master of his art seems to have braced Young’s nerves. Kean could not extinguish him as he extinguished Booth when those two acted together in the same play. Edmund, who spoke of Macready as ‘a player,’ acknowledged Young to be ‘an actor.’ Kean confessed Young’s superiority in Iago, and he could not bear to think of playing either that character or Pierre after him. Edmund believed in the greater merit of his own Othello. Young allowed that Kean had genius, but he was not enthusiastic in his praise; and Edmund, whose voice in tender passages was exquisite music, referred to the d——d musical voice of Young; and in his irritable moments spake of him as ‘that Jesuit!’

The greatest of Young’s original characters was his Rienzi. In Miss Mitford’s tragedy, Young pronounced ‘Rome’ Room. Many old play-goers can recollect how ill the word fell from his musical lips. John Kemble would never allow an actor in his company to give other utterance to the monosyllable. It was a part of the vicious and fantastic utterances of the Kemble family. Leigh Hunt has furnished a long list of them. Shakespeare, indeed, has ‘Now it is Rome indeed, and room enough,’ as Cassius says. But in ‘Henry VI.,’ when Beaufort exclaims, ‘Rome shall remedy this!’ Warwick replies, ‘Roam thither, then!’ The latter jingle is far more common than the former. We agree with Genest, ‘Let the advocates for Room be consistent. If the city is Room, the citizens are certainly Roomans.’ They who would have any idea how John Kemble mutilated the pronunciation of the English language on the stage, have only to consult the appendix to Leigh Hunt’s ‘Critical Essays on the Performers of the London Theatres.’ Such pronunciation seems now more appropriate to burlesque than to Shakespeare.

When the idea was first started of raising a statue in honour of Kemble, Talma wrote to ‘mon cher Young,’ expressing his wish to be among the subscribers. ‘In that idea I recognise your countrymen,’ said Talma. ‘I shall be too fortunate here if the priests leave me a grave in my own garden.’ The Comte de Soligny, or the author who wrote under that name, justly said in his ‘Letters on England,’ that Young was unlike any actor on the stage. His ornamental style had neither model nor imitators. ‘I cannot help thinking,’ writes the Count, ‘what a sensation Young would have created had he belonged to the French instead of the English stage. With a voice almost as rich, powerful, and sonorous as that of Talma—action more free, flowing, graceful, and various; a more expressive face, and a better person—he would have been hardly second in favour and attraction to that grandest of living actors. As it is, he admirably fills up that place on the English stage which would have been a blank without him.’ This is well and truly said, and it is applicable to ‘Gentleman Young’ throughout his whole career—a period during which he played a vast variety of characters, from Hamlet to Captain Macheath. He was not one of those players who were always in character. Between the scenes of his most serious parts he would keep the green-room merry with his stories, and be serious again as soon as his part required him. Young’s modest farewell to the stage reminds us of Garrick’s. The latter took place on June 10, 1776. The play was ‘The Wonder,’ Don Felix by Garrick; with ‘The Waterman.’ The bill is simply headed, ‘The last time of the company’s performing this season,’ and it concludes with these words: ‘The profits of this night being appropriated to the benefit of the Theatrical Fund, the Usual Address upon that Occasion Will be spoken by Mr. Garrick before the Play.’ The bill is now before us, and not a word in it refers to the circumstance that it was the last night that Garrick would ever act, and that he would take final leave after the play. All the world was supposed to know it. The only intimation that something unusual was on foot is contained in the words, ‘Ladies are desired to send their servants a little after 5, to keep places, to prevent confusion.’ Garrick’s farewell speech is stereotyped in all dramatic memories. His letter to Clutterbuck in the previous January is not so familiar. He says, ‘I have at last slipt my theatrical shell, and shall be as fine and free a gentleman as you should wish to see upon the South or North Parade of Bath. I have sold my moiety of patent, &c., for 35,000l., to Messrs. Dr. Ford, Ewart, Sheridan, and Linley.... I grow somewhat older, though I never played better in all my life, and am resolved not to remain upon the stage to be pitied instead of applauded!’ Garrick was sixty years of age when he left the stage. Young was five years less. In his modest farewell speech, after the curtain had descended on his Hamlet, he said, ‘It has been asked why I retire from the stage while still in possession of whatever qualifications I could ever pretend to unimpaired. I will give you my motives, although I do not know you will accept them as reasons—but reason and feeling are not always cater-cousins. I feel then the toil and excitement of my calling weigh more heavily upon me than formerly; and, if my qualifications are unimpaired, so I would have them remain in your estimate.... I am loth to remain before my patrons until I have nothing better to present them than tarnished metal.’ Among Young’s after-enjoyments was that of music. We well remember his always early presence in the front row of the pit at the old Opera House, and the friendly greetings that used to be exchanged between him and Mori, Nicholson, Linley, Dragonetti, and other great instrumentalists, as they made their appearance in the orchestra.

Some theatrical impulses never abandoned him. During his retirement at Brighton, he was a constant attendant on the ministry of Mr. Sortain. ‘Mr. Bernal Osborne told me he was one day shown into the same pew with my father, whom he knew. He was struck with his devotional manner during the prayers and by his rapt attention during the sermon. But he found himself unable to maintain his gravity when, as the preacher paused to take breath after a long and eloquent outburst, the habits of the actor’s former life betrayed themselves, and he uttered in a deep undertone, the old familiar “Bravo!”’ As a sample of his cheerfulness of character, we may quote what Mr. Cole says of Young, in the life of Charles Kean:—‘Not long before he left London for his final residence at Brighton, he called, with one of his grandsons, to see the writer of these pages, who had long enjoyed his personal friendship, and who happened at the moment to be at dinner with his family. “Tell them,” he said to the servant, “not to hurry; but when they are at leisure, there are two little boys waiting to see them.”’

A quiet humour seems to have been among the characteristics of a life which generally was marked by unobtrusive simplicity and moral purity. A man who, when a boy, had been at Eton and Merchant Taylors’ could not have been ignorant of such a fact as the Punic War, though he may have forgotten the date. He was once turned to by a lady at table (she had been discussing history with the guest on her other side), and she suddenly asked Young to tell her the date of the Second Punic War. Young frankly replied in one of his most tragic tones; ‘Madam, I don’t know anything about the Punic War, and what is more, I never did! My inability to answer your question has wrung from me the same confession which I once heard made by a Lancashire farmer, with an air of great pride, when appealed to by a party of his friends in a commercial room, “I tell you what, in spite of all your bragging, I’ll wedger (wager) I’m th’ ignorantest man in t’ coompany!”’ There can be little doubt that many of the stories of mistakes made by actors may be traced to him. Among them, perhaps, that of the player who, invariably, for ‘poisoned cup,’ said ‘coisoned pup;’ and who, once pronouncing it correctly, was hissed for his pains. Thence too perhaps came the tale of him who, instead of saying,

How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is,

To have a thankless child,

exclaimed: