So wrote Garrick of Hill, who was a clever man, but one who lacked tact and judgment, and got buffeted by men who had not a tithe of his zeal and industry. His chief defect lay in his intolerable conceit.
Dodsley's "Cleone," rejected by Garrick, became the distinction of the Covent Garden season of 1758-59. Ross played Sifroy, and Mrs. Bellamy the heroine. As a counter-attraction, Garrick essayed Marplot, in vain. "Cleone" is a romantic tragedy. The time is that of the Saracenic invasion of the south of France, and the story bears close resemblance to the legend of St. Genevieve, where a faithful young wife and mother suffers under unmerited charges of treason to her absent husband and her home. The author extended his drama from three acts to five, at the suggestion of Pope. Dr. Johnson subsequently looked upon it as the noblest effort made since the time of Otway! and Lord Chesterfield contributed advice which shows that stage-French was not of the best quality in those days. "You should instruct the actors," he said, "not to mouth out the oy in the name of Sifroy as though they were crying oysters." "People," writes Gray to Mason, "who depised 'Cleone' in manuscript, went to see it, and confess 'they cried so!'" Dodsley, after some flatness, "piled the agony" skilfully, and Mrs. Bellamy made hearts ache and eyes weep, for many successive glorious and melancholy nights.
The stage lost Mrs. Macklin this year, such an "old woman" as it was not to see again till the period of Mrs. Davenport. In October 1759,[83] too, Theophilus Cibber satisfied people that he was not born to be hanged. With Lord Drogheda and his son, Harlequin Mattocks,[84] Miss Wilkinson the wire-dancer, and a shipload of frippery, he was crossing the Irish Sea from Parkgate to Dublin, when the vessel was caught in a gale, and went down with all on board. Such was the end of a fair player and a sad rogue. Somewhere off the Scottish coast, whither the ship had been blown, perished Ancient Pistol, and the original George Barnwell. His sire, wife, and sister bore the calamity which had fallen upon him with philosophical equanimity.
On the retirement of Barry from London, Garrick travelled abroad, for a year, to recruit his health.[85] All the intervening time, till Barry returned, has the appearance of a season of truce. No great tragic actor arose to seize the wreath of either of the absent tragedians, though the town was seduced from its respective allegiances, for a moment, by the advent and bright promise of young Powell; and Walpole was eager to recognise a greater than Garrick in the aspiring city clerk.
Walpole was accustomed to describe Garrick as a mere machine, in whom the power to express Shakspeare's words with propriety, was absurdly held to be a merit! "On the night of Powell's first appearance, the audience," says Walpole, "not content with clapping, stood up and shouted." Walpole adds, that Powell had been clerk to Sir Robert Ladbroke, and "so clever in business, that his master would have taken him in as a partner; but he had an impulse for the stage. His figure is fine, and voice most sonorous, as they say, but I wait for the rebound of his fame, and till I can get in, but at present all the boxes are taken for a month." Walpole suppresses the fact that Garrick had not only selected Powell as his substitute, in his absence, but had carefully instructed him in the part of Philaster, and thereby helped him to the triumphant position which the younger actor, then twenty-eight years of age, held during the first of his few seasons, from 1763 to 1768, the year of poor Powell's death.
No new tragic poet of eminence now arose, nor did any old one increase his reputation. Home is supposed to have been thinking of the siege of Berwick when, in his "Siege of Aquileia," he pourtrayed our Edward under the figure of Maximin. Brooke's boasted purity of language and sentiment in his "Earl of Essex" was playfully crushed by Johnson. "Who rules o'er freemen should himself be free," was a line cited for its beauty, by Sheridan, the actor. "Who drives fat oxen should himself be fat," was the stupid comment of the lexicographer.
Farce flourished within this period,—supplied by the Rev. Mr. Townley, Garrick, Foote, Colman, and Murphy, the last of whom increased his fame by such comedies as the bustling, and yet monotonously bustling, "All in the Wrong," and the "Way to Keep Him." The authors of this period sought to correct faults and not to laugh at them. This, perhaps, gives a didactic turn to the plays of Murphy and Mrs. Sheridan, which renders them somewhat heavy when compared with the comedies of those who were rather among the wits, than the teachers, of their days. But a new brilliancy, too, was to be found in the later writers. Colman's "Jealous Wife," in which Garrick and Mrs. Pritchard were the Mr. and Mrs. Oakley, and the "Clandestine Marriage," principally Colman's, but in which Garrick had a share, were full of this brilliancy. With the exception of Hoadley's "Suspicious Husband," no modern comedy had such success as these. Every great actor still tries Mr. Oakley, and the noblest of old beaux has been the heritage only of the most finished of our comedians, from King, with whom it originated, down to Farren, with whom it seems to have died.
While the insolence of servants and the weaknesses of masters were satirised in "High Life below Stairs," a piece which George Selwyn was the gladder to see, as he was weary of low life above stairs—the disinterestedness of Irish wooers was asserted in Macklin's "Love à la Mode;" rascality, generally, was pummelled in Foote's "Minor;" novel-reading was proved to be perilous, in "Polly Honeycomb;" sharpers were exposed in Reed's "Register Office;" Platonic love was shown to be not without its dangers, in "The Deuce is in Him," and so on, with other pieces, than which none raised more laughter than the "Mayor of Garratt," in which Weston exhibited, in Jerry Sneak, the type of henpecked husbands, and Foote in Matthew Mug, a portrait of the Duke of Newcastle. Then Whitehead, in his "School for Lovers," wrote a dull play on society to show that society was dull; and Mrs. Sheridan, in the "Discovery," pointed to the absurdity of young married people being unhappy. Opera was making way at both houses, but especially at Covent Garden, where, with a few other novelties of no note, Arne's "Artaxerxes," superbly set, was as superbly sung, by Tenducci, Beard, and Arne's famous pupil, Miss Brent. Bickerstaffe's "Love in a Village" followed, warbled by Beard and Miss Brent, as Hawthorn and Rosetta, and made joyous by Shuter's Justice Woodcock. The same writer's "Maid of the Mill" succeeded, in which Mattocks played Lord Aimworth; Beard, Giles; and Miss Brent, Polly,[86] the latter with a joyousness that never dreamed of the coming penury and hunger.