| When the Stage heard that death had struck her John, Gay Comedy her Sables first put on; Laughter lamented that her Fav’rite died, And Mirth herself, (’tis strange) laid down and cry’d. Wit droop’d his head, e’en Humour seem’d to mourn, And solemnly sat pensive o’er his urn. |
Garrick’s epitaph to the memory of James Quin, at Bath, is very fine:—
| That tongue, which set the table in a roar, And charm’d the public ear, is heard no more; Closed are those eyes, the harbingers of wit, Which spoke, before the tongue, what Shakespeare writ; Cold are those hands, which, living, were stretch’d forth, At friendship’s call, to succour modest worth. Here is James Quin! Deign, reader, to be taught, Whate’er thy strength of body, force of thought, In Nature’s happiest mould however cast, “To this complexion thou must come at last.” |
Several actors are buried in the churchyard of St. Peter of Mancroft, Norwich. On Henrietta Maria Bray, who died in 1737, aged sixty years, is the following epitaph:—
| Here, Reader, you may plainly see, That Wit nor Humour here could be A Proof against Mortality. |
Anne Roberts died in 1743, aged thirty, and on her gravestone is a couplet as follows:—
| The World’s a Stage, at Birth our Plays begun, And all find Exits when their Parts are done. |
The Norwich actors, says Mr. James Hooper, were celebrated in their day, and their services were in great request. They used to play annually at the great Stourbridge Fair, at Cambridge, so vividly described by De Foe in his “Tour through the whole Island of Great Britain” (1722). The University Dons mustered in force to see the Norwich mummers, and part of the pit, known as “The Critics’ Row,” was reserved for Dr. Farmer of Emanuel, and his friends, George Stevens, Malone, and others, who never thought it infra dig. to applaud rapturously—a circumstance which shows Puritan Emanuel in a new light.[1]
In St. Mary’s Church, Beverley, a tablet is placed in remembrance of a notable Yorkshire actor:—
In Memory of
Samuel Butler,
A poor player that struts and
frets his hour upon the stage, and
then is heard no more.
Obt. June 15th, 1812.
Æt. 62.