[107] 1712.
THE NEW AND OLD THEATRES ROYAL, HAYMARKET.
[CHAPTER XVII.]
THE PROGRESS OF JAMES QUIN, AND DECLINE OF BARTON BOOTH.
Quin made great advances in the public favour in the season of 1718-19, at Lincoln's Inn, where, however, as yet, he only shared the leading business in tragedy and comedy with Ryan, and the less distinguished Evans. Southwark Fair, a fashionable resort, contributed to the company a new actor, Bohemia or Boheme, with great comic power; and Susan Mountfort replaced for a few weeks Mrs. Rogers, who had held for a time the tragic parts once acted by Mrs. Barry and Bracegirdle, and who died about this time. Of Susan Mountfort's touching end I will speak in a future page. Mrs. Rogers had been on the stage since 1692, and numbered among her original parts:—Imoinda, Oriana, Melinda, and Isabinda, in "Oroonoko," "Inconstant," "Recruiting Officer," and "Busy Body."
During this season a French company acted for some time in the Fields, where the "Tartuffe" was also played against the "Nonjuror." The only novelty worthy of notice was the "Sir Walter Raleigh" of poor Dr. Sewell, in which Quin played the hero with indifferent success. The author was more remarkable than his piece. He was of good family, and a pupil of Boerhaave; but, unsuccessful as a practitioner in London, he, curiously enough, gained fortune and reputation in the smaller sphere of Hampstead, until, as a singular biographical notice informs us, "three other physicians settled at the same place, after which his gains became very inconsiderable." He became a poor poet instead of a rich physician; "kept no house, but was a boarder; was much esteemed, and so frequently invited to the tables of gentlemen in the neighbourhood, that he had seldom occasion to dine at home." Seven years after Quin failed to lift him into dramatic notoriety, this Tory opponent of the Whig Bishop of Salisbury, and one of the minor contributors (it is said) to the Spectator and Tatler, though he is not included in Bissett's lives of the writers in the first-named periodical, died, "and was supposed," says the anonymous biographer already quoted, "at that time to be in very indigent circumstances, as he was interred in the meanest manner, his coffin being little better than those allotted by the parish to their poor who are buried from the workhouses, neither did a single friend or relation attend him to the grave. No memorial was placed over his remains; but they lie just under a holly-tree, which formed part of a hedge-row, that was once the boundary of the churchyard." Such was the end of the poet, through whom Lincoln's Inn Fields hoped, in 1719, to recover its ancient prosperity.
Eventful incidents marked the Drury Lane season of 1719-20. It commenced in the middle of September, between which time, and the last week of the following January, things went on prosperously as between players and public, but not so as between patentees and the government. Within the period mentioned Miss Santlow had made Booth happy—an union which helped to make Susan Mountfort mad,[108] and Dennis's "Invader of His Country," and Southerne's "Spartan Dame," were produced. The former was the second of three adaptations[109] from Shakspeare's "Coriolanus." Forty years before, in 1682, Nahum Tate fancied there was something in the times like that depicted in the days of Coriolanus. To make the parallel more striking, he pulled Shakspeare's play to pieces, and out of the fragments built up his own "Ingratitude of a Commonwealth." Nahum altered all for the worse; and he wrote a new fifth act, which was still worse than the mere verbal or semi-alterations. The impudence of the destroyer was illustrated by his cool assurance in the prologue, that—