William Dowton took his farewell benefit at the Opera House, on June 8th, 1840; he was then in his seventy-ninth year—the only actor, except Macklin, who continued to wear his harness to such an advanced period. For nearly half a century he had enjoyed a first-class reputation, but it was found that, when extreme old age came upon him, he had saved no money. With the amount produced by the above benefit was purchased for him an annuity for a given number of years, on which he subsisted in ease and comfort; but, to the surprise of every one, by dint of regular habits and an iron constitution, he outlived the calculated time, and there was danger that he might be reduced to penury. He died in 1849.
Dowton, in 1836, visited the United States; but he was far too advanced in life to attract attention or draw money. He came back almost as poor as he went, but with a change in his political opinions. He entered the land of freedom a furious republican—he returned from it an ultra-Tory. He was constitutionally discontented, captious, and fretful; but, at the same time, warm-hearted and generous. His oddities were very amusing to those who were intimate with him. He would sit for hours in his dressing-room arranging and contemplating his wigs, those important accessories to his stage make-up. One of his peculiar mannerisms was never to play a part without turning his wig. When he acted Dr. Pangloss, a bet was made that there he would find his favourite manœuvre impracticable. He managed it, nevertheless. When Kenrick, the faithful old Irish servant, comes in exultingly, in the last scene, to announce the long-lost Henry Moreland, he was instructed to run against Dr. Pangloss, who thus obtained the desired opportunity of disarranging his head-gear.
Dowton undervalued Edmund Kean, whose merit he never could be induced to acknowledge. When the vase was presented to that great actor, he refused to subscribe, saying, "You may cup Mr. Kean, if you please, but you sha'n't bleed me." He said, too, the cup should be given to Joe Munden for his performance of Marall. Amongst other eccentricities, Dowton fancied (a delusion common to comedians) that he could play tragedy, and never rested until he obtained an opportunity of showing the town that Edmund Kean knew nothing of Shylock. But the experiment was, as might have been expected, a total failure. The great point of novelty consisted in having a number of Jews in court, to represent his friends and partisans, during the trial scene; and in their arms he fainted, when told he was, per force, to become a Christian. The audience laughed outright, as a commentary on the actor's conception. Once he exhibited, privately, to Mr. J. W. Cole, the last scene of Sir Giles Overreach, according to his idea of the author's meaning, and a very mirthful tragedy it proved. He had a strange inverted idea that Massinger intended Sir Giles for a comic character. He also fancied that he could play Lord Ogleby, when nature, with her own hand, had daguerreotyped him for Mr. Sterling. Such are the vagaries of genius, which are equally mournful and unaccountable.
[Liston in Tragedy.]
Play-goers of the present century narrate the early seriousness of Liston, the comedian, and his subsequent turn for tragedy; which may have suggested the apocryphal biography of the actor stated to be by Charles Lamb,[41] whence the following is abridged:—
Liston was lineally descended from Johan de L'Estonne, who came over with the Norman William, and had lands awarded him at Lupton Magna, in Kent. The more immediate ancestors of Mr. Liston were Puritans, and his father, Habakkuk, was an Anabaptist minister. At the age of nine, young Liston was placed under the tuition of the Rev. Mr. Goodenough, whose decease was attended with these awful circumstances. It seems that the old gentleman and his pupil had been walking out together, in a fine sunset, to the distance of three-quarters of a mile west of Lupton, when a sudden curiosity took Mr. Goodenough to look down upon a chasm, where a mining shaft had been lately sunk, but soon after abandoned. The old clergyman, leaning over, either with incaution or sudden giddiness (probably a mixture of both), instantly lost his footing, and, to use Mr. Liston's phrase, disappeared, and was doubtless broken into a thousand pieces. The sound of his head &c., dashing successively upon the projecting masses of the chasm had such an effect upon the youth Liston, that a serious sickness ensued, and even for many years after his recovery, he was not once seen so much as to smile.
The joint death of both his parents, which happened not many months after this disastrous accident, and were probably (one or both of them) accelerated by it, threw our youth upon the protection of his maternal great-aunt, Mrs. Sittingbourn, whom he loved almost to reverence. To the influence of her early counsels and manners he always attributed the firmness with which, in maturer years, thrown upon a way of life commonly not the best adapted to gravity and self-retirement, he was able to maintain a serious character, untinctured with the levities incident to his profession. Ann Sittingbourn (her portrait was painted by Hudson) was stately, stiff, and tall, with a cast of features strikingly resembling those of Liston. Her estate in Kent was spacious and well-wooded; and here, in the venerable solitudes of Charnwood, amid thick shades of the oak and beech (the last his favourite tree), Liston cultivated those contemplative habits which never entirely deserted him in after-years. Here he was commonly in summer months to be met, book in hand—not a play book—meditating. Boyle's Reflections was at one time his darling volume; this, in its turn, was superseded by Young's Night Thoughts, which continued its hold upon him throughout life. He carried it always about him; and it was no uncommon thing for him to be seen, in the refreshing intervals of his occupation, leaning against a side-scene, in a sort of Herbert-of-Cherbury posture, turning over a pocket edition of his favourite author.