The principal Character in the above-mentioned Piece will be sustained by different Actors of celebrity during the week, viz.
Tuesday Boiled Mutton, Wednesday Roast or Boiled Pork, Thursday Veal and Bacon, Friday Boiled Beef, Saturday Roast Mutton.
At Eight P.M. every evening the well known eccentric Pat Murphy (in company with his friend Pat Butter) will have the honour of making his appearance in his much admired hot-jacket of brown.
Theatre closed every Evening at half past Eleven.
N.B. A stout and venerable white-headed Porter from the office of Messrs Goodwyn & Co. will attend the Theatre for the purpose of keeping good order during the performance.
The whole got up under the immediate care of
Stage Manager W. Trampton.
Between forty and fifty years ago there was an amusing contest going on between two tradespeople in the City: both were hairdressers, and lived opposite each other. Seeing that the one throve by selling pomade made of bear’s grease, the other, knowing that it was just as good and more profitable to sell any other material in pots with “bear’s grease” on the label, started in opposition, using similar pots to those sold by his opponent, filled with an inexpensive unguent. The first dealer, who was known to keep bears in his cellar, and who had himself taken up once a week before the sitting alderman as a nuisance, by way of advertisement, killed a bear upon this, and hung him up whole in full sight in his shop. He also wrote in the window, “A fresh bear killed this day!” The other, who had but one bear in all the world, which he privately led out of his house after dark every night, and brought him back in the morning (to seem like a new supply going on), continued his sale, and announced in his window, “Our fresh bear will be killed to-morrow.” The original vendor then, determined to cut off his rival’s last shift, kept his actual bears, defunct, with the skins only half off, like calves at a butcher’s, hanging up always at his door, proclaimed that “all bear’s grease sold in pots was a vile imposture,” and desired his customers to walk in “and see theirs with their own eyes, cut and weighed from the animal.” This seemed conclusive for two days; but on the third, the cunning opposition was again to the fore, with a placard “founded on the opinion of nine doctors of physic,” which stated that bear’s grease “obtained from the animal in a tamed or domesticated state, will not make anybody’s hair grow at all.” In consequence of which, he went on to say, “he has formed an establishment in Russia (where all the best bears come from), for catching them wild, cutting the fat off immediately, and potting it down for London consumption.” And the rogue actually ruined the business of his antagonist, without going to the expense of killing a single bear, by writing all over his house, “Licensed by the Imperial Government—Here, and at Archangel.”
George Robins, the auctioneer, was a profound believer in the value of advertisements, and exercised all his ingenuity and ability, both of which were considerable, to devise fresh schemes for attracting public notice. His powers of producing a good bill were remarkable, as was also his facility of description. Robins’s style has been so often commented upon, and his work so often copied and burlesqued, that it is hardly worth while our touching upon either him or his bills. As, however, such a book as this would be hardly complete without a reference to the puffing genius of modern days, we select a portion—and only a portion, mind—of his description of the Colosseum in Regent’s Park, one of the greatest failures of speculative enthusiasts known, which, despite Robins and his panegyric, and despite the strenuous efforts which have been made to cultivate an unwilling populace into believing in it as a place of amusement, is now being demolished to make way for a set of dwelling-houses planned upon the site on which was reared the building described by the poetically-fancied auctioneer as, among many other things, a
CYCLOPÆAN STRUCTURE,
WHERE DESCRIPTION FAILS TO PORTRAY
“Its eloquent proportions,
Its mighty graduations,”