How sharper than a serpent’s thanks it is,
To have a toothless child.
Whatever may be the source of such stories, it is certain that Young’s criticisms of others were always clear and generous. A few words tell us of Mrs. Siddons’ Rosalind, that ‘it wanted neither playfulness nor feminine softness; but it was totally without archness, not because she did not properly conceive it—but how could such a countenance be arch?’ Some one has said more irreverently of her Rosalind, that it was like Gog in petticoats! Young looked back to the periods during which he had what he called ‘the good fortune to act with her, as the happiest of his own professional recollections.’ When he was a boy of twelve years of age (1789), he saw Mrs. Siddons in Volumnia (Coriolanus). Long after, he described her bearing in the triumphal procession in honour of her son in this wise: ‘She came alone marching and beating time to the music, rolling from side to side, swelling with the triumph of her son. Such was the intoxication of joy which flashed from her eye and lit up her whole face, that the effect was irresistible. She seemed to me to reap all the glory of that procession to herself. I could not take my eye from her. Coriolanus’ banner and pageant, all went for nothing to me, after she had walked to her place.’
We have spoken of the unobtrusive simplicity and the moral purity of this great actor’s life. Temptations sprang up about him. Young first appeared on the stage when the old drinking days had not yet come to an end. His name, however, never occurs among the annals of the fast and furious revelries. John Kemble belonged to the old school and followed its practices. He was not indeed fast and furious in his cups. He was solemnly drunken as became an earnest tragedian. It is somewhere told of him that he once went to Dicky Peake’s house half-cocked, at half-past nine P.M.; Sheridan, he said, had appointed to meet him there, and he would not neglect being in time for the world. Peake sat him down to wine with Dunn the treasurer: the three got exceedingly drunk, and all fell asleep, Kemble occupying the carpet. The tragedian was the first to wake. He arose, opened the window shutters, and dazzled by the morning sun-light roused his two companions, and wondered as to the time of day. They soon heard eight strike. ‘Eight!’ exclaimed Kemble; ‘this is too provoking of Sheridan; he is always late in keeping his appointments; I don’t suppose he will come at all now. If he should, tell him, my dear Dick, how long I waited for him!’ Therewith, exit John Philip, in a dreamy condition—leaving, at all events, some incidents out of which imaginative Dunn built this illustrative story.
Great writers in their own houses, like prophets among their own people, proverbially lack much of the consideration they find abroad. Mrs. Douglas Jerrold always wondered what it was people found in her husband’s jokes to laugh at. It is said that many years had passed over the head of Burns’s son before the young man knew that his father was famous as a poet. It is certain that Walter Scott’s eldest son had arrived at more than manhood before he had the curiosity to read one of his sire’s novels. He thought little of it when he had read it. This want of appreciation the son derived from his mother. Once, when Young was admiring the fashion of the ceiling, in Scott’s drawing-room at Abbotsford, Lady Scott exclaimed in her droll Guernsey accent, ‘Ah! Mr. Young, you may look up at the bosses in the ceiling, as long as you like, but you must not look down at my poor carpet, for I am ashamed of it. I must get Scott to write some more of his nonsense books and buy me a new one!’ To those who remember the charm of Young’s musical voice, Lady Dacre’s lines on his reciting ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ to the other guests at Abbotsford, will present themselves without any thought of differing from their conclusion, thus neatly put:—
And Tam o’ Shanter roaring fou,
By thee embodied to our view,
The rustic bard would own sae true,
He scant could tell
Wha ’twas the livin’ picture drew,