AT THE PLAY.
"Stand and Deliver."
The Merry Monarch's world is too much with us. I can't imagine what it is in that period that our actor-managers find so peculiarly appropriate to present conditions, when we need all the inspiration we can get out of our country's annals. It seems only the other day that in the same theatre, His Majesty's—the play was Mavourneen—I was assisting at a rout (is that the word?) of Restoration society. And here we have it all over again with the same scheme of a pretty débutante near to being compromised by the Royal favour; with the old galaxy of Court ladies inexplicably gay; the same old Duke of Buckingham; the old dull sport of improvisations; the old pathetic lack of wit; a réchauffé only tempered by slight variations, such as the substitution of Lely for Pepys, and the failure of the Monarch himself to put in an appearance.
For the rest, a generous allowance of swashbuckling, of kidnapping, of standing and delivering, of interludes for dancing and gallantry—in a word all the approved features of the High Toby. Nothing, you will guess, that threatened to overstrain our intelligence, but enough for the moderate excitation of those sympathies which we always concede to heroic villainy.
The clou of the evening was the scene of the waylaying of his lover's coach by Claude Duval on the Newmarket road. Animals on the stage (as distinct from the circus-ring) always make me nervous. Mr. Bourchier seemed to have anticipated my apprehension. On the approach of the travellers, having hitherto, with his horse's consent, sat motionless at the cross-roads, he retired with it into the wings and there dismounted and continued the scene on foot. But the memory of those few moments of superb equitation remained with the audience, and when, at the fall of the curtain, he led his steed forward by the bridle (a just tribute to its connivance) the pair of them brought down the house—and not the scenery, as I had feared.
I am no pedant that I should cavil at Mr. Justin Huntly McCarthy's re-adjustment of history. It was all for our delight that Claude Duval, instead of perishing on the scaffold, should escape from prison, have his freedom confirmed by the King's pardon, confound everybody else's knavish tricks and marry the lady of his heart. Nor do I complain that the historic highwayman (as I am credibly informed—for I got the facts from another critic) was only twenty-nine when they hanged him, and that Mr. Bourchier is—well, let me say, past the military age, or he wouldn't have been there at all. At the same time he will not mind my saying that, though he brought a very gallant spirit to his work, he lacked something of that resilience which is so desirable a quality in a Chevalier of the Road. Perhaps I liked best in him the quiet restraint with which he met the assaults of Orange Moll upon his loyalty to his lady. He was not given very many good things to say, but he made up for this defect by dropping his aspirates and talking in what I took to be a Serbian accent.
RIVER SCENE NEAR WESTMINSTER.