Undoubtedly the most marvellous example of dramatic eccentricity that was ever put upon record is the one which tells us of a regular performance by professional actors in a public theatre, before an ordinary audience, who had extraordinary interest in the drama. The locality was in Paris, in the old theatre of the Porte Saint-Martin. The piece was the famous melodrama, ‘La Pie Voleuse,’ on which Rossini founded ‘La Gazza Ladra,’ and which, under the name of ‘The Maid and the Magpie,’ afforded such a triumph to Miss Kelly as that lady may remember with pride; for we believe that most accomplished and most natural of all actresses still survives—or was surviving very lately—with two colleagues at least of the olden time, Mrs. W. West and Miss Love. When ‘La Pie Voleuse’ was being acted at the above-named French theatre, the allied armies had invaded France; a portion of the invading force had entered Paris. The circumstance now to be related is best told on French authority. An English writer might almost be suspected of calumniating the French people by narrating such an incident, unsupported by reference to the source from which he derived it. We take it from one of the many dramatic feuilletons of M. Paul Foucher, an author of several French plays, a critic of French players and play-writers, and a relative, by marriage, of M. Victor Hugo. This is what M. Paul Foucher tells us: ‘On the evening of the second entry of the foreign armies into Paris, the popular melodrama “La Pie Voleuse,” was being acted at the Porte Saint-Martin. There was one thousand eight hundred francs in the house, which at that time was considered a handsome receipt. During the performance the doors were closed, because the rumbling noise of the cannon, rolling over the stones, interrupted the interest of the dialogue, and it rendered impossible the sympathetic attention of the audience.’ Frenchmen there were who were ashamed of this heartless indifference for the national tragedy. Villemot was disgusted at this elasticity of the Parisian spirit, and he added to his rebuke these remarkable words:—‘I take pleasure in hoping that we may never again be subjected to the same trial, and that, in any case, we may bear it in a more dignified fashion.’ How Paris bore it, when the terrible event again occurred, is too well known to be retold; but the incident of ‘La Pie Voleuse’ is perhaps the most eccentric of the examples of dramatic and popular eccentricity to be found in the annals of the French stage.
NORTHUMBERLAND HOUSE AND THE PERCYS.
When Hotspur treads the stage with passionate grace, the spectator hardly dreams of the fact that the princely original lived, paid taxes, and was an active man of his parish, in Aldersgate Street. There, however, stood the first Northumberland House. By the ill-fortune of Percy it fell to the conquering side in the serious conflict in which Hotspur was engaged; and Henry IV. made a present of it to his queen, Jane. Thence it got the name of the Queen’s Wardrobe. Subsequently it was converted into a printing office; and in the course of time, the first Northumberland House disappeared altogether.
In Fenchurch Street, not now a place wherein to look for nobles, the great Earls of Northumberland were grandly housed in the time of Henry VI.; but vulgar citizenship elbowed the earls too closely, and they ultimately withdrew from the City. The deserted mansion and grounds were taken possession of by the roysterers. Dice were for ever rattling in the stately saloons. Winners shouted for joy, and blasphemy was considered a virtue by the losers. As for the once exquisite gardens, they were converted into bowling-greens, titanic billiards, at which sport the gayer City sparks breathed themselves for hours in the summer time. There was no place of entertainment so fashionably frequented as this second Northumberland House; but dice and bowls were at length to be enjoyed in more vulgar places, and ‘the old seat of the Percys was deserted by fashion.’ On the site of mansion and gardens, houses and cottages were erected, and the place knew its old glory no more. So ended the second Northumberland House.
While the above mansions or palaces were the pride of all Londoners and the envy of many, there stood on the strand of the Thames, at the bend of the river, near Charing Cross, a hospital and chapel, whose founder, William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, had dedicated it to St. Mary, and made it an appanage to the Priory of Roncesvalle, in Navarre. Hence the hospital on our river strand was known by the name of ‘St. Mary Rouncivall.’ The estate went the way of such property at the dissolution of the monasteries; and the first lay proprietor of the forfeited property was a Sir Thomas Cawarden. It was soon after acquired by Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, son of the first Earl of Surrey. Howard, early in the reign of James I., erected on the site of St. Mary’s Hospital a brick mansion which, under various names, has developed into that third and present Northumberland House which is about to fall under pressure of circumstances, the great need of London, and the argument of half a million of money.
Thus the last nobleman who clung to the Strand, which, on its south side, was once a line of palaces, has left it for ever. The bishops were the first to reside on that river-bank outside the City walls. Nine episcopal palaces were once mirrored in the then clear waters of the Thames. The lay nobles followed, when they felt themselves as safe in that fresh and healthy air as the prelates. The chapel of the Savoy is still a royal chapel, and the memories of time-honoured Lancaster and of John, the honest King of France, still dignify the place. But the last nobleman who resided so far from the now recognised quarters of fashion has left what has been the seat of the Howards and Percys for nearly three centuries, and the Strand will be able no longer to boast of a duke. It also recently possessed an English earl; but he was only a modest lodger in Norfolk Street.
When the Duke of Northumberland went from the Strand, there went with him a shield with very nearly nine hundred quarterings; and among them are the arms of Henry VII., of the sovereign houses of France, Castile, Leon, and Scotland, and of the ducal houses of Normandy and Brittany! Nunquam minus solus quam cum solus, might be a fitting motto for a nobleman who, when he stands before a glass, may see therein, not only the Duke, but also the Earl of Northumberland, Earl Percy, Earl of Beverley, Baron Lovaine of Alnwick, Sir Algernon Percy, Bart., two doctors (LL.D. and D.C.L.), a colonel, several presidents, and the patron of two-and-twenty livings.
As a man who deals with the merits of a book is little or nothing concerned with the binding thereof, with the water-marks, or with the printing, but is altogether concerned with the life that is within, that is, with the author, his thoughts, and his expression of them, so, in treating of Northumberland House, we care much less for notices of the building than of its inhabitants—less for the outward aspect than for what has been said or done beneath its roof. If we look with interest at a mere wall which screens from sight the stage of some glorious or some terrible act, it is not for the sake of the wall or its builders: our interest is in the drama and its actors. Who cares, in speaking of Shakespeare and Hamlet, to know the name of the stage carpenter at the Globe or the Blackfriars? Suffice it to say, that Lord Howard, who was an amateur architect of some merit, is supposed to have had a hand in designing the old house in the Strand, and that Gerard Christmas and Bernard Jansen are said to have been his ‘builders.’ Between that brick house and the present there is as much sameness as in the legendary knife which, after having had a new handle, subsequently received in addition a new blade. The old house occupied three sides of a square. The fourth side, towards the river, was completed in the middle of the seventeenth century. The portal retains something of the old work, but so little as to be scarcely recognisable, except to professional eyes.