THE INSPIRED MUSICIAN AND THE CHRISTMAS HAM.
OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
I can't help thinking that Mr. H. G. Hibbert has not chosen altogether the right name for his second volume of theatrical and Bohemian gossip, A Playgoer's Memories (Grant Richards). It is not so unsophisticated as the title had somehow led me to expect. Indeed "unsophisticated" is perhaps the last epithet that could justly be applied to Mr. Hibbert's memories. I fancy I had unconsciously been looking for something more in the style of my own ignorant playgoing. "How wonderful she was in that scene with the broker's man," or "Do you remember the opening of the Third Act?" Not thus Mr. Hibbert. For him the play itself is far less the thing than a peg upon which to hang all sorts of tags and bobtails of recollection, financial, technical and just not scandalous because of the discretion of the telling. His book is a repository of theatrical information, but the great part of it of more absorbing concern for the manager's-room or the stage-door than, say, the dress circle. But I must not be wanting in gratitude for the entertainment which, for all this carping, I certainly derived from it. As an expert on stage finance, for example, to-day and forty years back, Mr. Hibbert has revelations that may well cause the least concerned to marvel. And there is an appendix, which gives a list of Drury Lane pantomimes, with casts, for half a century, including, of course, the incomparable first one; but that is not a memory of this world. A book to be kept for odd references in two senses.