Ivan. He'll make 'em in their knavish doings halt;
His action will be battery and as——
Reb.Salt!
Ivan. Out of his land he'll soon make each a stepper,
When he returns, by Jove, he'll give 'em——
Isaac. Pepper!
In another scene Isaac gives vent to a piece of mock-heroic execration directed against Brian de Bois-Guilbert:—
Avenge me, then, ye fates, I do implore.
May he, like me, be martyr to lumbager,
Tic-doloreux, sciatica, and ager,
Sore-throats, neuralgia, hooping-cough, and sneezing,
Rheumatics, asthma, colds, and bronchial wheezings.
And while the north-east wind doth round him blow,
Ye clouds, hail, mizzle, drizzle, sleet, and snow;
Rain rakes and pitchforks, kittens, cats and dogs,
While down his throat pour vapours, mists, and fogs.
May broken chilblains ever stud his toes,
May icicles hang pendent from his nose,
May winter's cold his shaving-water freeze,
May he be stopped whene'er he's going to sneeze.
And when appalled you loudly call for helps,
May palsies seize you——
Sir B. Oh, shade of Mr. Phelps![51]
Next to "Ivanhoe" in popularity for travestie we may place "Rob Roy." Mr. Sydney French took it in hand at the Marylebone in 1867, and Mr. William Lowe gave it a very Scotch rendering, in 1880, under the title of "Mr. Robert Roye, Hielan Helen his Wife, and Dougal the Dodger." But the "standard" burlesque on the subject is, of course, Mr. Burnand's "Robbing Roy" (Gaiety, 1879), in which Mr. Terry was such a diverting "Roy," with Miss Farren as Francis, Miss Vaughan as Diana, and Mr. Royce as an admirable Dougal. Of the "Bride of Lammermoor" there have been two burlesque versions—Oxberry's, at the Strand in 1848; and H. J. Byron's, at the Prince of Wales's in 1865. "Kenilworth" has been similarly honoured. There was the piece brought out at the Strand in 1858 by Andrew Halliday and a collaborator, and there was that which Messrs. Reece and Farnie contributed to the Avenue Theatre in 1885. "Guy Mannering" has engaged the attention of Mr. Burnand: we can all remember his "Here's another Guy Mannering," brought out at the Vaudeville in 1874. For the solitary travestie of "The Talisman," the late J. F. M'Ardle is responsible. It was first played at Liverpool in the year last named.
Lord Lytton's novels and romances have been ridiculed on the stage very much less frequently than have his dramas. "The Very Last Days of Pompeii," by Mr. Reece, and "The Last of the Barons," by Mr. Du Terreaux, are, so far as I know, the only stage works in which his prose fiction has been perverted. The former was seen at the Vaudeville in 1872, and the latter at the Strand in the same year. In "The Last of the Barons," Atkins was the Kingmaker, Mr. Edward Terry portraying Edward IV. as a great dandy, and endowing him with an amusing lisp.
When we turn to the stories of more recent times, we think at once of the "No Thoroughfare" of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, and of the "Foul Play" of Charles Reade and Dion Boucicault, as having suffered at the hands of the irreverent scribes. The former romance suggested to Hazlewood junior his "No Thorough-fair beyond Highbury, or the Maid, the Mother, and the Malicious Mountaineer." This was in 1868; and in the following year the elder George Grossmith emulated Hazlewood's example at the Victoria Theatre. "Foul Play" was parodied by Mr. Burnand, not only in the pages of Punch, but in "Fowl Play, or a Story of Chikkin Hazard," produced at the New Queers in 1868.[52] Of the bright writing in this "book," no better specimen could well be furnished than the song which Wylie sings in description of the scuttling of the Proserpine. This I give in full:—