With horns and trumpets now to madness swell.
Now sink in sorrow with a tolling bell;
Such happy arts attention can command,
When fancy flags and sense is at a stand.
The notion of storing lightning in a bottle for use when required seems to have been frequently reverted to by the authors of the last century as a means of entertaining the public. Thus a writer in "The World," in 1754, makes no doubt "of being able to bring thunder and lightning to market at a much cheaper price than common gunpowder," and describes a friend who has applied himself wholly to electrical experiments, and discovered that "the most effectual and easy method of making this commodity is by grinding a certain quantity of air between a glass ball and a bag of sand, and when you have ground it into fire your lightning is made, and then you may either bottle it up, or put it into casks properly seasoned for that purpose, and send it to market." The inventor, however, confesses that what he has hitherto made is not of a sufficient degree of strength to answer all the purposes of natural lightning; but he is confident that he will soon be able to effect this, and has, indeed, already so far perfected his experiments that, in the presence of several of his neighbours, he has succeeded in producing a clap of thunder which blew out a candle, accompanied by a flash of lightning which made an impression upon a pat of butter standing upon the table. He is also confident that in warm weather he can shake all the pewters upon his shelf, and fully expects, when his thermometer is at sixty-two degrees and a half, to be able to sour all the small beer in his cellar, and to break his largest pier-glass. This paper in "The World," apart from its humorous intention, is curious as a record of early dabblings in electrical experiments. It may be mentioned that in one of Franklin's letters, written apparently before the year 1750, the points of resemblance between lightning and the spark obtained by friction from an electrical apparatus are distinctly stated. It is but some thirty-five years ago that Andrew Crosse, the famous amateur electrician, was asked by an elderly gentleman, who came to witness his experiments with two enormous Leyden jars charged by means of wires stretched for miles among the forest trees near Taunton: "Mr. Crosse, don't you think it is rather impious to bottle the lightning?"
"Let me answer your question by asking another," said Crosse, laughing. "Don't you think it might be considered rather impious to bottle the rain-water?"
Further, it may be remembered that curious reference to this part of our subject is made by "the gentleman in the small clothes" who lived next door to Mrs. Nickleby, and presumed to descend the chimney of her house. "Very good," he is reported to have said on that occasion, "then bring in the bottled lightning, a clean tumbler, and a corkscrew."
The early days of George Frederick Cooke were passed at Berwick-upon-Tweed. Left an orphan at a very tender age, he had been cared for and reared by two aunts, his mother's sisters, who provided him with such education as he ever obtained. There were no play-books in the library of these ladies, yet somehow the youth contrived to become acquainted with the British drama. Strolling companies occasionally visited the town, and a certain passion for the theatre possessed the boys of Berwick, with Cooke, of course, among them. They formed themselves into an amateur company, and represented, after a fashion, various plays, rather for their own entertainment, however, than the edification of their friends. And they patronised, so far as they could, every dramatic troupe that appeared in the neighbourhood of Berwick. But they had more goodwill than money to bestow upon the strollers, and were often driven to strange subterfuges in their anxiety to see the play, and in their inability to pay the price of admission to the theatre. On one occasion Cooke and two or three friends secreted themselves beneath the stage, in the hope of stealing out during the performance and joining the audience by means of an opening in a dark passage leading to the pit. Discovery and ignominious ejection followed upon this experiment. Another essay led to a curious adventure. Always on the alert to elude the vigilance of the doorkeeper, the boys again effected an entrance into the theatre. The next consideration was how to bestow themselves in a place of concealment until the time for raising the curtain should arrive, when they might hope, in the confusion and bustle behind the scenes, to escape notice, and enjoy the marvels of the show. "Cooke," records his biographer, "espied a barrel, and congratulating himself on this safe and snug retreat, he crept in, like the hero of that immortal modern drama, 'Tekeli.'" Unfortunately this hiding-place was one of considerable peril. Cooke perceived that for companion tenants of his barrel he had two large cannon-balls—twenty-four pounders; but being as yet but incompletely
initiated into the mysteries of the scene, he did not suspect the theatrical use to which these implements of war were constantly applied. He was in the thunder-barrel of the theatre! The play was "Macbeth," and the thunder was required in the first scene, to give due effect to the entrance of the witches. "The Jupiter Tonans of the theatre, alias the property-man, approached and seized the barrel. Judge the breathless fear of my hero—it was too great for words, and he only shrunk closer to the bottom of his hiding-place. His tormentor proceeded to cover the open end of the barrel with a piece of old carpet, and to tie it carefully, to prevent the thunder from being spilt. Still George Frederick was most heroically silent; the machine was lifted by the Herculean property-man, and carried carefully to the side scene, lest in rolling the thunder should rumble before its cue. It would be a hopeless task to paint the agitation of the contents of the barrel. The property-man, swearing the barrel was unusually heavy, placed the complicated machine in readiness, the witches entered amid flames of rosin; the thunder-bell rang, the barrel renewed its impetus, and away rolled George Frederick and his ponderous companions. Silence would now have been no virtue, and he roared most manfully, to the surprise of the thunderer, who, neglecting to stop the rolling machine, it entered on the stage, and George Frederick, bursting off the carpet head of the barrel, appeared before the audience just as the witches had agreed to meet when 'the hurly-burly's done.'" Cooke's biographer, Mr. William Dunlap, thought that this story bore "sufficient marks of probability." It must be said, however, that as to anecdotes touching their heroes, biographers are greatly prone to be credulous.
The illusions of the stage were much enhanced by Garrick's Alsatian scene-painter, Philip James de Loutherbourg, a man of genius in his way, and an eminent innovator and reformer in the matter of theatrical decoration. Before his time the scenes had been merely strained "flats" of canvas, extending the whole breadth and height of the stage. He was the first to introduce set scenes and what are technically called "raking pieces." He invented transparent scenes, with representations of moonlight, rising and setting suns, fires, volcanoes, &c., and contrived effects of colour by means of silk screens of various hues placed before the foot and side lights. He was the first to represent a
mist by suspending a gauze between the scene and the spectator. For two seasons he held a dioramic exhibition of his own, called the Eidophusikon, at the Patagonian Theatre in Exeter Change, and afterwards at a house in Panton Square. The special attraction of the entertainment was a storm at sea, with the wreck of the "Halsewell," East Indiaman. No pains were spared to picture the tempest and its most striking effects. The clouds were movable, painted upon a canvas of vast size, and rising diagonally by means of a winding machine. The artist excelled in his treatment of clouds, and by regulating the action of his windlass he could direct their movements, now permitting them to rise slowly from the horizon and sail obliquely across the heavens and now driving them swiftly along according to their supposed density and the power ascribed to the wind. The lightning quivered through transparent places in the sky. The waves carved in soft wood from models made in clay, coloured with great skill, and highly varnished to reflect the lightning, rose and fell with irregular action, flinging the foam now here, now there, diminishing in size, and dimming in colour, as they receded from the spectator. "De Loutherbourg's genius," we are informed, "was as prolific in imitations of nature to astonish the ear as to charm the sight. He introduced a new art—the picturesque of sound." That is to say, he imitated the noise of thunder by shaking one of the lower corners of a large thin sheet of copper suspended by a chain; the distant firing of signals of distress from the doomed vessel he counterfeited by suddenly striking a large tambourine with a sponge affixed to a whalebone spring, the reverberations of the sponge producing a peculiar echo as from cloud to cloud dying away in the distance. The rushing washing sound of the waves was simulated by turning round and round an octagonal pasteboard box, fitted with shelves, and containing small shells, peas, and shot; while two discs of tightly-strained silk, suddenly pressed together, produced a hollow whistling sound in imitation of loud and fitful gusts of wind. Cylinders, loosely charged with seed and small shot, lifted now at one end, now at the other, so us to allow the contents to fall in a pattering stream, effectually reproduced the noise of hail and rain. The moon was formed by a circular aperture cut in a tin box containing a powerful argand lamp, which was placed at the back of the scene, and brought near or
removed from the canvas as the luminary was supposed to be shining brightly or to be obscured by clouds. These contrivances of Mr. de Loutherbourg may now, perhaps, be deemed to be of rather a commonplace description—they have figured so frequently, and in such amplified and amended forms, upon the modern stage; but they were calculated to impress the painter's patrons very considerably; they were then distinctly innovations due to his curiously inventive genius, and the result of much labour and heedful ingenuity. If the theatrical entertainments of the present time manifest little progress in histrionic art, there has been, at any rate, marked advance in the matter of scenic illusions and mechanical effects. The thunder of our modern stage storms may no more proceed from mustard-bowls, or from "troughs of wood with stops in them," but it is, at any rate, sufficiently formidable and uproarious, sometimes exciting, indeed, the anxiety of the audience, lest it should crash through the roof of the theatre, and visit them bodily in the pit; while for our magnesium or lime-light flashes of lightning, they are beyond anything that "spirit of right Nantz brandy" could effect in the way of lambent flames, have a vividness that equals reality, and, moreover, leave behind them a pungent and sulphurous odour that may be described as even supernaturally noxious. The stage storm still bursts upon the drama from time to time; the theatre is still visited in due course by its rainy and tempestuous season; and thunder and lightning are, as much as in Addison's time, among the favourite devices of our playwrights, "put in practice to fill the minds of an audience with terror." The terror may not be quite of the old kind, but still it does well enough.