“It has been asserted, that these exhibitions engender a ferocious spirit; but were I to judge from what I saw, and from the inquiries I made into the characters of the players at Ropley Dean, from the farmers on my right and left, I should pronounce quite the contrary; and think that as long as the sword is used by our cavalry and navy, and as long as we wish to entertain in the nation a fearless, generous, martial spirit, we should encourage the like pastimes at our fairs and revels.”
[ MISCELLANY.]
A general sense seems to pervade all the most intelligent men of Great Britain that a reformation is wanting in almost every department of life in that country. The corruption of public taste in dramatic literature and acting, and in most of the fashionable amusements of the high flyers cries aloud, no less than that of the state, for a heavy-handed scourge and receives it. Among other things, the musico-mania is attacked as having reached the highest acmé of absurdity. The Covent Garden proprietors are very roughly handled, but not more roughly than they deserve, for hiring Madam Catalani at the enormous salary of four thousand pounds sterling and a free benefit for the season, with a provision annexed, which is thought insolent, degrading, and unjust; no less than that of her French husband putting what fiddlers he pleases into the orchestra. The public prints are filled with remonstrances to the people, whose attention is directed to the storm which was raised on a similar occasion in 1755 and 1756, and which burst with such tremendous mischief on the head of Garrick. One writer thus vehemently expresses himself: “Shall a judge of the land be required to exercise the faculties of his vigorous mind, which have been cultivated and matured by an expensive education and the most laborious study; shall he be continually employed in discriminating between right and wrong, in the adjustment of individual differences, and in protecting the persons and properties of the honest and peaceable part of his majesty’s subjects from the assaults of violence and the stratagems of fraud; shall his sensibility be wounded, and his heart pierced by the painful necessity to which he is frequently reduced of passing on his fellow-man those awful sentences which the nature of their crimes, and the voice of Justice imperiously demand; shall he, in short, be compelled to discharge the duties of an office which necessarily renders his nights anxious and restless, and subjects him in the day to the most irksome fatigue—and shall he, for all this fatigue of body and unremitting solicitude of mind, receive a salary scarcely exceeding half the sum given to an Italian cantatrice for the display of her vocal powers for a few nights?”
The fact is that the robust and vigorous appetite of the English has been worn down by the intemperate use of German dramas, and is so vitiated and enfeebled that it can swallow nothing but hot spiced trash, or water gruel spoon-meat. Are the French wrong in calling John Bull stupide barbare when they see him pouring thousands into the laps of foreign singers—and for what?—why, to sing such songs as this:
Tom Gobble was a grocer’s son,
Heigho! says Gobble;
He gave a ven’son dinner for fun,
And he had a belly as big as a tun,
With his handy dandy, bacon and gravy,
Ah, hah, says alderman Gobble.