Corporal.'Cause I'm Thursday, dear.
In the realm of Spanish legend there have been still fewer explorers. Albert Smith took one of Washington Irving's tales of the Alhambra, and fashioned it into "The Alhambra, or The Beautiful Princess," played at the Princess's in 1851, with the Keeleys, Wigan, Harley, Flexmore, and Miss Vivash. H. J. Byron afterwards went to the same source for "The Pilgrim of Love," in the first cast of which—at the Haymarket in 1860—we find the names of Mrs. Buckingham White as the Pilgrim, Chippendale as his tutor, Compton as the King of Toledo, Rogers as the King of Granada, and C. Coghlan as Mafoi, a Frenchman: a rather notable collocation of distinguished players.
The Fables of Æsop have inspired at least one travestie—"Leo the Terrible," by Stirling Coyne and Francis Talfourd. In this piece (brought out at the Haymarket in 1852) all the characters but four wore the heads of beasts or birds—a lion (Bland), a wolf (Buckstone), a fox, an owl, a ram, a poodle, a cat (Miss Maskell), and so on. The four exceptions were Sir Norval de Battersea, Timoleon Sindbad Potts (Keeley), Æsop, and Gay; and the play opened with a rencontre between the two last-named worthies. Æsop began with a vocal parody on "The Light of other Days":—
To write in other days as Gay did,
The world is grown too fast;
The rage for La Fontaine has faded—
The stream run dry at last.
On me the world has turned the tables
And turned to bad, I guess;
For they who thus can spurn my Fables
Must care for morals less.
Stop; who comes here? If I to judge am able,
'Tis Gay, the worthiest son of modern Fable.
Enter Gay dejectedly.
Gay (soliloquising). My old dominion
On earth is gone.
Æsop (rising). Gad! that's just my opinion.
Gay. Æsop! What brings you here? Why thus, by Styx,
Are you, your staff and luggage, in a fix?
As downcast as a 'prentice runaway.
Æsop. Am I? Well, you look anything but Gay,
But tell me—whither have you wandering been?
Gay. About the world. Such changes now I've seen—
Such altered views of virtue and rascality;
There's not a fable left—'tis all reality.