There was nothing within the bounds of comedy that Lacy could not act well. Evelyn styles him "Roscius." Frenchman, or Scot, or Irishman, fine gentleman or fool, rogue or honest simpleton, Tartuffe or Drench, old man or loquacious woman,—in all, Lacy was the delight of the town for about a score of years. The King ejected the best players from parts, considered almost as their property, and assigned them to Lacy. His wardrobe was a spectacle of itself, and gentlemen of leisure and curiosity went to see it. He took a positive enjoyment in parts which enabled him to rail at the rascalities of courtiers. Sometimes this Aristophanic licence went too far. In Howard's "Silent Woman," the sarcasms reached the King, and moved his majesty to wrath, and to locking up Lacy himself in the Porter's Lodge. After a few days' detention, he was released; whereupon Howard, meeting him behind the scenes, congratulated him. Lacy, still ill in temper, abused the poet for the nonsense he had put into the part of Captain Otter, which was the cause of all the mischief. Lacy further told Howard he was "more a fool than a poet." Thereat the honourable Edward, raising his glove, smote Lacy smartly with it over the face. Jack Lacy retaliated by lifting his cane and letting it descend quite as smartly on the pate of a man who was cousin to an earl. Ordinary men marvelled that the honourable Edward did not run Jack through the body. On the contrary, without laying hand to hilt, Howard hastened to the King, lodged his complaint, and the house was thereupon ordered to be closed. Thus, many starved for the indiscretion of one; but the gentry rejoiced at the silencing of the company, as those clever fellows and their fair mates were growing, as that gentry thought, "too insolent."
Lacy, soon after, was said to be dying, and altogether so ill-disposed, as to have refused ghostly advice at the hands of "a bishop, an old acquaintance of his," says Pepys, "who went to see him." Who could this bishop have been who was the old acquaintance of the ex-dancing-master and lieutenant? Herbert Croft, or Seth Ward?—or, Isaac Barrow, of Sodor-and-Man, whose father, the mercer, had lived near the father of Betterton? But, whoever he may have been, the King's favour restored the actor to health; and he remained Charles's favourite comedian till his death, in 1681.
When Lacy's posthumous comedy, "Sir Hercules Buffoon," was produced in 1684, the man with the longest and crookedest nose, and the most wayward wit in England—Tom Durfey—furnished the prologue. In that piece he designated Lacy as the standard of true comedy. If the play does not take, said lively Tom—
"all that we can say on't
Is, we've his fiddle, but not his hands to play on't!"
Genest, a critic not very hard to please, says that Lacy's friends should have "buried his fiddle with him."
Michael Mohun is the pleasantest and, perhaps, the greatest name on the roll of the King's Company. When the players offended the King, Mohun was the peacemaker.
One cannot look on Mohun's portrait, at Knowle, without a certain mingling of pleasure and respect. That long-haired young fellow wears so frank an aspect, and the hand rests on the sword so delicately yet so firmly! He is the very man who might "rage like Cethegus, or like Cassius die." Lee could never willingly write a play without a part for Mohun, who, with Hart, was accounted among the good actors that procured profitable "third days" for authors. No Maximin could defy the gods as he did; and there has been no franker Clytus since the day he originally represented the character in "Alexander the Great." In some parts he contested the palm with Betterton, whose versatility he rivalled, creating one year Abdelmelich, in another Dapperwit, in a third Pinchwife, and then a succession of classical heroes and modern rakes or simpletons. Such an actor had many imitators, but, in his peculiar line, few could rival a man who was said to speak as Shakspeare wrote, and whom nature had formed for a nation's delight. The author of the Epilogue to "Love in the Dark" (that bustling piece of Sir Francis Fane's, from the Scrutinio,[27] in which, played by Lacy, Mrs. Centlivre derived her Marplot), illustrates the success of Mohun's imitators by an allusion to the gout from which he suffered:
"Those Blades indeed, but cripples in their art,—
Mimic his foot, but not his speaking part."