STEPHEN C. FOSTER.
The negro minstrel will give up his tambourine, for it is as old as the days of the Exodus, when Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances; and he will give up the bones, for Miss Olive Logan, in Harper’s Magazine for April, 1879, traces them back to the reign of Fou Hi, Emperor of China, 3468 B.C., while Shakspere’s King of the Fairies, who made an ass of the hard-handed man of Athens, also treated Bottom to the melody of the bones. He will hang up his fiddle and his bow when the time comes, cheerfully enough, for Nero, according to tradition, fiddled for the dancing of the flames that consumed Rome nineteen hundred years ago. None of these are exclusively his own; but it would be very cruel to take from him his banjo, which he evolved if he did not invent, and without which he can be and can do nothing.
ACT III.
THE AMERICAN BURLESQUE.
THE AMERICAN BURLESQUE.
“The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.”