Transcriber’s Note:
Obvious typographic errors have been corrected.

DRURY LANE

VOL. I.

LONDON: PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
AND PARLIAMENT STREET

IN AND ABOUT

DRURY LANE

AND OTHER PAPERS

REPRINTED FROM THE PAGES OF THE ‘TEMPLE BAR’ MAGAZINE

BY

D^R DORAN

AUTHOR OF ‘TABLE TRAITS AND SOMETHING ON THEM’ ‘JACOBITE LONDON’
‘QUEENS OF ENGLAND OF THE HOUSE OF HANOVER’

IN TWO VOLUMES

VOL. I.

LONDON
RICHARD BENTLEY & SON, NEW BURLINGTON STREET
Publishers in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen
1881

All rights reserved

PREFATORY REMARKS.

The republication of papers which have originally appeared in a Magazine frequently requires justification.

In the present instance this justification, it is thought, may be found in the special knowledge which Dr. Doran had of all matters pertaining to the stage; in his intimacy with the literature which treats of manners and customs, English and foreign; and in his memory, which retained and retailed a great amount of anecdote, told with a sprightly wit.

These volumes, reprinted with one or two exceptions from the pages of the ‘Temple Bar’ Magazine, will, it is believed, be found to contain many good stories, and much information unostentatiously conveyed. It is hoped, therefore, that the public will endorse the opinion of the writer of this Preface, and consider that the plea of justification has been made out.

G. B.

CONTENTS

OF

THE FIRST VOLUME.

IN AND ABOUT DRURY LANE.

In the afternoon of ‘Boxing-day,’ 1865, I had to pass through Drury Lane, and some of the worst of the ‘slums’ which find vent therein. There was a general movement in the place, and the effect was not savoury. There was a going to-and-fro of groups of people, and there was nothing picturesque in them; assemblings of children, but alas! nothing lovable in them. It was a universal holiday, yet its aspect was hideous.

Arrived at the stage-door of Drury Lane Theatre, I found my way on to the stage itself, where the last rehearsal of the pantomime, to be played for the first time that evening, was progressing.

The change from the external pandemonium to the hive of humming industry in which I then stood, was striking and singular. Outside were blasphemy and drunkenness. Inside, boundless activity, order, hard work, and cheerful hearts. There was very much to do, but every man had his especial work assigned him, every girl her allotted task. An unaccustomed person might have pronounced as mere confusion, that shifting of scenes, that forming, unforming, and reforming of groups, that unintelligible dumb show, that collecting, scattering, and gathering together of ‘young ladies’ in sober-coloured dresses and business-like faces, who were to be so resplendent in the evening as fairies, all gold, glitter, lustrous eyes, and virtuous intentions. There was Mr. Beverley—perhaps the greatest magician there—not only to see that nothing should mar the beauty he had created, but to take care that the colours of the costumes should not be in antagonism with the scenes before which they were to be worn. There was that Michael Angelo of pantomimic mask inventors, Mr. Keene, anxiously looking to the expressions of the masks, of which he is the prince of designers. Then, if you think those graceful and varied figures of the ballet as easy to invent, or to trace, as they seem, and are, at last, easily performed, you should witness the trouble taken to invent, and the patience taken to bring to perfection—the figures and the figurantes—on the part of the artistic ballet-master, Mr. Cormack. But, responsible for the good result of all, there stands Mr. Roxby, stern as Rhadamanthus, just as Aristides, inflexible as determination can make him, and good-natured as a happy child, he is one of the most efficient of stage-managers, for he is both loved and feared. No defect escapes his eye, and no well-directed zeal goes without his word of approval. Messrs. Falconer and Chatterton are meanwhile busy with a thousand details, but they wisely leave the management of the stage to their lieutenant-general, who has the honour of Old Drury at heart.

When a spectator takes his seat in front of the curtain, he is hardly aware that he is about to address himself to an entertainment, for the production of which nearly nine hundred persons—from the foremost man down to the charwoman—are constantly employed and liberally remunerated. Touching this ‘remuneration,’ let me here notice that I have some doubt as to the story of Quin ever receiving 50l. a night. By the courtesy of Mr. ——, the gentleman at the head of the Drury Lane treasury, and by the favour of the proprietors, I have looked through many of the well-kept account-books of bygone years. These, indeed, do not, at least as far as I have seen, go back to the days of Quin, but there are traces of the greater actor Garrick, who certainly never received so rich an honorarium. His actual income it is not easy to ascertain, as his profits as proprietor were mixed up with his salary as actor. It has often been said that Garrick was never to be met with in a tavern (always, I suppose, excepting the ‘Turk’s Head’), but he appears to have drawn refreshment during the Drury Lane seasons, as there is unfailing entry in his weekly account of ‘the Ben Jonson’s Head bill,’ the total of which varies between sixteen and five-and-twenty shillings.

At Drury Lane, John Kemble does not appear to have ever received above 2l. a night, exclusive of his salary as a manager. Nor did his sister’s salary for some years exceed that sum. When Edmund Kean raised the fallen fortunes of old Drury, he only slowly began to mend his own. From January 1814, to April 1815, during the time the house was open, Kean’s salary was 3l. 8s. 8d. nightly. If the theatre was open every night in the week, that sum was the actor’s nightly stipend, whether he performed or not. If there were only four performances weekly, as in Lent, he and all other actors were only paid for those four nights. Within the period I have named, Elliston received a higher salary than Kean, namely 5l. per night, or 30l. per week, if the house was open for six consecutive nights. The salary of Dowton and Munden, during the same period, was equal to that of Kean. They received at the rate of 3l. 8s. 8d. nightly, or 20l. weekly, if there were six performances, irrespective as to their being employed in them or not. That great actor Bannister, according to these Drury Lane account-books, at this period received 4s. per night less than Kean, Dowton and Munden; while Jack Johnstone’s salary was only 2l. 10s. nightly, and that was 6s. 8d. less than was paid to the handsome, rather than good player, Rae.

It was not till April 1815, when Kean was turning the tide of Pactolus into the treasury, that his salary was advanced to 4l. 3s. 8d. per night. This was still below the sum received by Elliston. Kean had run through the most brilliant part of his career, before his salary equalled that of Elliston. In 1820, it was raised to 30l. per week if six nights; but Elliston’s stipend at that time had fallen to 20l., and at the close of the season that of Kean was further raised to 40l. for every six nights that the house was open. That sum is occasionally entered in the books as being for ‘seven days’ pay,’ but the meaning is manifestly ‘for the acting week of six days.’

At this time Mrs. Glover was at the head of the Drury Lane actresses, and that eminent and great-hearted woman never drew from the Drury Lane treasury more than 7l. 13s. 4d. weekly. From these details, it will be seen that the most brilliant actors were not very brilliantly paid. The humbler yet very useful players were, of course, remunerated in proportion.

There was a Mr. Marshall who made a successful début on the same night with Incledon in 1790, in the ‘Poor Soldier,’ the sweet ballad-singer, as Dermot; Marshall, as Bagatelli. The latter soon passed to Drury Lane, where he remained till 1820. The highest salary he ever attained was 10s. per night; yet with this, in his prettily-furnished apartments in Crown Court, where he lived and died, Mr. Marshall presided, like a gentleman, at a hospitable table, and in entertaining his friends never exceeded his income. You might have taken him in the street for one of those enviable old gentlemen who have very nice balances at their bankers.

The difference between the actor’s salaries of the last century and of this, is as great in France as in England. One of the greatest French tragedians, Lekain, earned only a couple of thousand livres, yearly, from his Paris engagement. When Gabrielli demanded 500 ducats yearly, for singing in the Imperial Theatre at St. Petersburg, this took the Czarina’s breath away. ‘I only pay my field-marshals at that rate,’ said Catherine.

‘Very well,’ replied Gabrielli, ‘your Majesty had better make your field-marshals sing.’

With higher salaries, all other expenses have increased. Take the mere item of advertisements, including bill-sticking and posters at railway stations, formerly, the expense of advertising never exceeded 4l. per week; now it is never under 100l. Of bill-stickers and board-carriers, upwards of one hundred are generally employed. In the early part of the last century, the proprietors of a newspaper thought it a privilege to insert theatrical announcements gratis, and proprietors of theatres forbade the insertion of their advertisements in papers not duly authorised!

Dryden was the first dramatic author who wrote a programme of his piece (‘The Indian Emperor’), and distributed it at the playhouse door. Barton Booth, the original ‘Cato,’ drew 50l. a year for writing out the daily bills for the printer. In still earlier days, theatrical announcements were made by sound of drum. The absence of the names of actors in old play-books, perhaps, arose from a feeling which animated French actors as late as 1789, when those of Paris entreated the maire not to compel them to have their names in the ‘Affiche,’ as it might prove detrimental to their interests. Some of our earliest announcements only name the piece, and state that it will be acted by ‘all the best members of the company, now in town.’ There was a fashion, which only expired about a score or so of years ago, as the curtain was descending at the close of the five-act piece, which was always played first, an actor stepped forward, and when the curtain separated him from his fellows, he gave out the next evening’s performance, and retired, bowing, through one of the doors which always then stood, with brass knockers on them, upon the stage.

The average expenses of Drury Lane Theatre at Christmas-tide, when there are extra performances, amount to nearly 1,500l. per week. The rent paid is reckoned at 4,500l. for two hundred nights of acting, and only 5l. per night for all performances beyond that number. About 160l. must be in the house before the lessees can begin to reckon on any profit. In old times, the presence of royalty made a great difference in the receipts. On February 12, 1777,I find from the books that the ‘Jealous Wife,’ and ‘Neck or Nothing,’ were played. An entry is added that ‘the king and queen were present,’ and the result is registered under the form, ‘receipts 245l. 9s. 6d., a hundred pounds more than the previous night.’

The number of children engaged in a pantomime at Drury Lane generally exceeds two hundred. The girls are more numerous than the boys. It is a curious fact that in engaging these children the manager prefers the quiet and dull to the smart and lively. Your smart lad and girl are given to ‘larking’ and thinking of their own cleverness. The quiet and dull are more ‘teachable,’ and can be made to seem lively without flinging off discipline. These little creatures are thus kept from the streets; many of them are sons and daughters of persons employed in the house, and their shilling a night and a good washing tells pleasantly in many a humble household, to which, on Saturday nights, they contribute their wages and clean faces. It was for a clever body of children of this sort that benefits were first established in France in 1747. In England they date from Elizabeth Barry, on whose behalf the first was given, by order of James the Second.

Then there are the indispensable, but not easily procured, ‘ladies of the ballet.’ They number about five dozen; two dozen principals, the rest in training to become so. Their salary is not so low as is generally supposed—twenty-five, and occasionally thirty shillings a week. They are ‘respectable.’ I have seen three or four dozen of them together in their green-room, where they conducted themselves as ‘properly’ as any number of well-trained young ladies could at the most fashionable of finishing establishments.

There was a scene in the ‘Sergeant’s Wife’ which was always played with a terrible power by Miss Kelly; and yet the audience, during the most exciting portion of the scene, saw only the back of the actress. Miss Kelly represented the wife, who, footsore and ignorant of her way, had found rude hospitality and rough sleeping quarters in a wretched hut. Unable to sleep, something tempts her to look through the interstices of the planks which divide her room from the adjoining one. While looking, she is witness of the commission of a murder. Spell-bound, she gazes on, in terror almost mute, save a few broken words. During this incident the actress had her back turned to the audience; nevertheless, she conveyed to the enthralled house an expression of overwhelming and indescribable horror as faithfully as if they had seen it in her features or heard it in her voice. Every spectator confessed her irresistible power, but none could even guess at the secret by which she exercised it.

The mystery was, in fact, none at all. Miss Kelly’s acting in this scene was wonderfully impressive, simply because she kept strictly to nature. She knew that not to the face alone belongs all power of interpretation of passion or feeling. This knowledge gave to Rich his marvellous power as Harlequin. In the old days, when harlequinades had an intelligible plot in which the spectators took interest, it was the office of Harlequin to guard the glittering lady of his love from the malice of their respective enemies. There always occurred an incident in which Columbine was carried off from her despairing lord, and it was on this occasion that Rich, all power of conveying facial expression being cut off by his mask, used to move the house to sympathy, and sometimes, it is said, to tears, by the pathos of his mute and tragic action. As he gazed up the stage at the forced departure of Columbine every limb told unmistakably that the poor fellow’s heart was breaking within him. When she was restored the whole house broke forth into a thunder of exultation, as if the whole scene had been a reality.

I cannot tell how this was effected, but I can tell a story that is not unconnected with the terrible pantomime of suffering nature.

Some years ago an unfortunate man, who had made war against society, and had to suffer death for it in front of the old Debtors’ door, Newgate, took leave of his wife and daughters not many hours before execution, in presence of the ‘Reverend Ordinary,’ Mr. Cotton, and a young officer in the prison, who has since attained to eminence and corresponding responsibility in the gloomy service to which he is devoted. The scene of separation was heartrending to all but the doomed man, who was calm, and even smiled once or twice, in order to cheer, if he could, the poor creatures whom he had rendered cheerless for ever. When the ordinary and the prison officer were left alone, the reverend gentleman remarked—‘Well, H——, what do you think of the way in which the prisoner went through that?’

‘Wonderfully, sir,’ answered H——, ‘considering the circumstances.’

‘Wonderfully!’ replied Mr. Cotton, ‘yes; but not in your sense, my friend.’

‘In what sense, then, sir?’ asked H——.

‘You said “wonderfully.” I know very well, wherefore—because you saw him smile; and because he smiled, you thought he did not feel his condition as his wife and daughters did.’

‘I confess that is the case,’ said the young officer.

‘Ah! H——,’ exclaimed Mr. Cotton, ‘you are new to this sort of thing. You looked in the man’s face, and thought he was bold. I had my eye on his back, and I saw that it gave his face the lie. It showed that he was suffering mortal agony.’

H—— looked inquiringly at the chaplain, who answered the look by saying, ‘Listen to me, H——. You are young. Some day you will rise to a post that will require you to sit in the dock, behind the prisoners who are tried on capital charges. On one of those occasions, you will see what is common enough—a prisoner who is saucy and defiant, and who laughs in the judge’s face as he puts on the black cap, and while he is condemning him. Well, H——, if you want to know what that prisoner really feels, don’t look at his face—look at his back. All along and about the spine, you will find it boiling, heaving, surging, like volcanic matter. Keep your eye upon it, H——; and when you see the irrepressible emotion in the back suddenly subsiding, open wide your arms, my boy, for the seemingly saucy fellow is about to tumble into them, in a dead faint. All the “sauce,” Mr. H——, will be out of him at once, and perhaps for ever, unless he be exceptionally constituted.’

A little party of visitors was gathered round the narrator of this, the other day, in that dreadful room where Calcraft keeps his ‘traps and things.’ I had my hand on the new coil already prepared and in order for the next criminal who may deserve it; another was looking at Jack Sheppard’s irons, which were never able to confine him; and others, with a sort of unwilling gaze at things in a half-open cupboard, which looked like the furniture of a saddle-room, but which were instruments of other purposes. We all turned to the speaker, as he ceased, and inquired if his experience corroborated Mr. Cotton’s description. H—— answered in the affirmative, and he went into particulars to which we listened with the air of men who were curious yet not sympathizing; but I felt, at the same time, under the influences of the place, and of being suddenly told that I was standing where Calcraft stands on particular occasions, a hot and irrepressible motion adown the back, which satisfied me that the Cottonian theory had something in it, and that Miss Kelly, without knowing it, was acting in strict accordance with nature, when she made her back interpret to an audience all the anguish she was supposed to feel at the sorry sight on which her face was turned.

By way of parenthesis, let me add that Mr. Cotton himself was a most accomplished actor on his own unstable boards. When he grew somewhat a-weary of his labour—it was a heavy labour when Monday mornings were hanging mornings, and wretches went to the beam in leashes—when Mr. Cotton was tired of this, he thought of a good opportunity for retiring. ‘I have now,’ he said, ‘accompanied just three hundred and sixty-five poor fellows to the gallows. That’s one for every day in the year. I may retire after seeing such a round number die with cotton in their ears.’ Whether the reverend gentleman was the author of this ingenious comparison for getting hanged, or whether he playfully adopted the phrase which was soon so popularly accepted as a definition, cannot now be determined.

While on this subject, let me notice that, with the exception of one Matthew Coppinger, a subaltern player in the Stuart days, no English actor has ever suffered death on the scaffold. Mat’s offence was not worse than the mad Prince’s on Gad’s Hill, and it must be confessed that one or two other gentlemen of the King’s or Duke’s company ‘took to the road’ of an evening, and perhaps deserved hanging, though the royal grace saved them. Neither in England nor France has an actor ever appeared on the scaffold under heavy weight of crime. As for taking to the highway, baronets’ sons have gone that road on their fathers’ horses; and society construed lightly the offences of highwaymen who met travellers face to face and set life fairly against life. In England, Coppinger alone went to Tyburn. In France, I can recall but two out of the many thousands of actors who have trodden its very numerous stages,—not including an occasional player who suffered for political reasons during the French Revolution. One of the two was Barrières, a Gascon, who, after studying for the church and the law, turning dramatic poet and mathematician, and finally enlisting in the army, obtained leave of absence, and profited thereby by repairing to Paris, and appearing at the Théâtre Français, in 1729, as Mithridate. His Gascon extravagance and eccentricity caused at first much amusement, but he speedily established himself as an excellent general actor, and forgot all about his military leave of absence. Not so his colonel, who had no difficulty in laying his hand on the Gascon recruit, who was playing in his own name in Paris, and under authority of a furlough, the period of which he had probably exceeded—the document itself he had unfortunately lost. Barrières was tried, condemned, and shot, in spite of all the endeavours made to save him.

Sixty years later it went as hardly with Bordier, an actor of the Variétés, of whom I have heard old French players speak with great regard and admiration. He was on a provincial tour, when he talked so plainly at tables d’hôte of the misery of the times and the prospects of the poor, that he was seized and tried at Rouen under a charge of fomenting insurrection in order to lower the price of corn. Just before his seizure he had played the principal part (L’Olive) in ‘Trick against Trick’ (Ruses contre Ruses), in which he had to exclaim gaily: ‘You will see that to settle this affair, I shall have to be hanged!’ And Bordier was hanged, unjustly, at Rouen. He suffered with dignity, and a touch of stage humour. He had been used to play in Pompigny’s ‘Prince turned Sweep’ (Ramoneur Prince)—a piece in which Sloman used to keep the Coburg audience in a roar of delight. In the course of the piece, standing at the foot of a ladder, and doubtful as to whether he should ascend or not, he had to say: ‘Shall I go up or not?’ So, when he came to the foot of the lofty ladder leaning against the gigantic gallows in the market-place at Rouen, Bordier turned with a sad smile to the hangman and said: ‘Shall I go up or not?’ The hangman smiled too, but pointed the way that Bordier should go; and the wits of Rouen were soon singing of him in the spirit of the wits of Covent Garden singing of Coppinger:

Mat did not go dead, like a sluggard to bed,

But boldly, in his shoes, died of a noose

That he found under Tyburn tree.

To return to more general statistics, it may be stated that, in busy times, four dozen persons are engaged in perfecting the wardrobes of the ladies and gentlemen. Only to attire these and the children, forty-five dressers are required; and the various coiffures you behold have busily employed half a dozen hairdressers. If it should occur to you that you are sitting over or near a gasometer, you may find confidence in knowing that it is being watched by seventeen gasmen; and that even the young ladies who glitter and look so happy as they float in the air in transformation scenes, could not be roasted alive, provided they are released in time from the iron rods to which they are bound. These ineffably exquisite nymphs, however, suffer more or less from the trials they have to undergo for our amusement. Seldom a night passes without one or two of them fainting; and I remember, on once assisting several of them to alight, as they neared the ground, and they were screened from the public gaze, that their hands were cold and clammy, like clay. The blood had left the surface and rushed to the heart, and the spangled nymphs who seemed to rule destiny and the elements, were under a nervous tremor; but, almost as soon as they had touched the ground, they shook their spangles, laughed their light laugh, and tripped away in the direction of the stately housekeeper of Drury, Mrs. Lush, with dignity enough not to care to claim kinship with her namesake, the judge; for she was once of the household of Queen Adelaide, and now has the keeping of ‘the national theatre,’ with nine servants to obey her behests.

To those who would compare the season of 1865-1866 at Drury Lane with that of 1765-1766, it is only necessary to say that a hundred years ago Mrs. Pritchard was playing a character of which she was the original representative in 1761, namely, Mrs. Oakley, in Coleman’s ‘Jealous Wife,’ a part which has been well played this year by Mrs. Vezin to the excellent Mr. Oakley of Mr. Phelps. The Drury Lane company, a hundred years ago, included Garrick, Powell, Holland, King, Palmer, Parsons, Bensley, Dodd, Yates, Moody, Baddeley, all men of great but various merit. Among the ladies were Mrs. Cibber, Mrs. Yates, Mrs. Clive, Mrs. Abington, Mrs. Pritchard, Miss Pope, Mrs. Baddeley, and some others—a galaxy the like of which, in any one company, could nowhere be found in these later days. In that season of a hundred years ago, a new actress, Mrs. Fitzhenry, very nearly gained a seat upon the tragic throne. In the same season Melpomene lost her noblest daughter, albeit the last character her name was attached to in the bills was Lady Brute. I allude to Mrs. Cibber. ‘Mrs. Cibber dead!’ was Garrick’s cry; ‘then tragedy has died with her.’ Since that season of a century since, there has been no such Ophelia as hers, the touching charm of which used to melt a whole house to tears. It was the season in which Garrick abolished the candles in brass sockets, fixed in chandeliers, which hung on the stage; in place of which he introduced the footlights, which were then supplied by oil, and long retained the significant name of ‘floats.’ In that season, the first benefit was given for the Drury Lane Theatrical Fund, ‘for the relief of those who, from infirmities, shall be obliged to retire from the stage.’ On this occasion Garrick acted Kitely, in ‘Every Man in his Humour.’ Lastly, in that season was produced, for the first time, the ever-lively comedy, ‘The Clandestine Marriage,’ in which King, as Lord Ogleby, won such renown that Garrick never ceased to repent of his having declined the character. After he left the stage he did not seem to be sorry for the course he had taken. ‘You all think,’ he used to say, ‘that no one can excel, or even equal King, in Lord Ogleby. It had great merit, but it was not my Lord Ogleby; and if I could appear again, that is the only character in which I should care to play.’ And, no doubt, Roscius would have delighted his audience, though his new reading might not have induced them to forget the original representation.

ABOUT MASTER BETTY.

In a valley at the foot of the Slieve Croob mountains, in County Antrim, there is a pretty village called Ballynahinch. The head of the river Lagan, which flows by Belfast into the lough, is to be found in that valley. Near the town is a ‘spa,’ with a couple of wells, and a delicious air, sufficient in itself to cure all travellers from Dublin who have narrowly escaped being poisoned by the Liffey, in whose murderous stinks the metropolitan authorities seem to think the chief attraction to draw strangers to Dublin is now to be found.

To the flax-cultivating Ballynahinch, in the last quarter of the last century, a gentleman named Betty brought (after a brief sojourn at Lisburn) his young English wife and their only child, a boy. This married couple were of very good blood. The lady was of the Stantons, of Hopton Court. Mr. Betty’s father was a physician of some celebrity, at Lisburn, where, and in the neighbourhood, he practised to such good purpose that he left a handsome fortune to his son. That son invested a portion of his inheritance in a farm, and in the manufacture of linen at Ballynahinch. Whence the Bettys originally came it would be hard to say. A good many Huguenots lie in the churchyard at Lisburn, and the Bettys may have originally sprung from a kindred source. In the reign of George the Second there was a Rev. Joseph Betty, who created a great sensation by a sermon which he preached at Oxford. Whether the Betty of Oxford was an ancestor of him of Ballynahinch is a question which may be left to Mr. Forster, the pedigree hunter.

I have said that with his young wife Mr. Betty took to Ireland their son. Their boy was, and remained, their only child. He was born at Shrewsbury, which place is also proud of having given birth to famous Admiral Benbow, also to Orton, the eminent Nonconformist. Master Betty was English born and Irish bred; half-bred, however; for his English mother was his nurse, his companion, his friend—in other words, his true mother. Such an only child used to be called ‘a parlour child,’ to denote that there was more intercourse between child and parent than exists in a ‘nursery child,’ to whom the nurse seems his natural guide and ruler.

The English lady happened to be a lady well endowed as to her mind, her tastes, and her accomplishments. She was exactly the mother for such a boy. She was not only excessively fond of reading the best poets, but of reading passages aloud, or reciting them from memory. Her audience was her boy. His tastes were in sympathy with his mother’s, and he was never more delighted than when he sat listening to her reading or reciting, except when he was reciting passages to her. It was a peculiar training; it really shaped the boy’s life—and it was no ill shape which the life took. The father had his share, however, in clearing the path for the bright, though brief, career. One day the father, whose intellectual tastes responded to his wife’s, repeated to his son the speech of Cardinal Wolsey, beginning, ‘Farewell, a long farewell, to all my greatness.’ In doing this, he suited the action to the word. Young Betty had never seen this before, and he asked the meaning of it. ‘It is what is called acting,’ said the father. The boy thought over it, tried by himself action and motion with elocution, and he spoke and acted the cardinal’s soliloquy before his mother with an effect that excited in her the greatest surprise and admiration.

Not the faintest idea of the stage had, at this time, entered the minds of any of the family. The eager young lad himself was satisfied with reading plays, learning passages from them, and reciting speeches from ‘Douglas’ and ‘Zara,’ from ‘Pizarro’ and the ‘Stranger.’ He also repeated the episodical tales from Thomson’s ‘Seasons.’ Only the above trace of his learning anything from Shakespeare is to be found, but he listened to readings from the national poet by one or other of his parents. This course had its natural results. By degrees the boy took to rude attempts, from domestic materials, of dress. ‘Properties’ were created out of anything that could be turned to the purpose; a screen was adopted for scenery; audiences of ones and twos were pressed by the stage-struck youth to tarry and see him act; and finally his father, well qualified, taught him fencing, the son proving an apt pupil, and becoming a swordsman as perfect and graceful as Edmund Kean himself.

His reputation spread beyond home into distant branches of the family. Those branches shook with disgust. The parents were warned that if they did not take care the boy would come to the evil end of being a play-actor! They were alarmed. The domestic stage was suppressed; silence reigned where the echoes of the dramatic poets once pleasantly rang, and the heir of Hopton Court and Hopton Wafers was ignominiously packed off to school. When I say ‘the heir,’ it is because Master Betty was so called; but it really seems as if his claim resembled that of the Irish gentleman who was kept out of his property by the rightful owner.

There is no record of Master Betty’s school life. We only know that it did not suppress his taste for dramatic poetry and dramatic action. At this time, 1802, Mrs. Siddons, who had been acting with her brother, John Kemble, to empty houses at Drury Lane, left England, in disgust at the so-called ‘Drury treasury,’ for Ireland. It was the journey on which she set out with such morbid feelings of despair, as if she were assured of the trip ending by some catastrophe. It was, in fact, all triumph, and in the course of her triumphant career she arrived in Belfast, where, with other parts, she acted Elvira in ‘Pizarro.’ She had not thought much of the part of the camp-follower when she was first cast for it, and Sheridan was so dilatory that she had to learn the last portion of the character after the curtain had risen for the first acting of the piece. But Sarah Siddons was a true artist. She ever made the best of the very worst materials; she invested Elvira with dignity, and it became by far the most popular of the characters of which she was the original representative. Young Betty entered a theatre for the first time to see Sheridan’s ‘Pizarro’ acted at the Belfast theatre, and Mrs. Siddons as Elvira. The boy’s tastes were in the right direction. He had neither eyes, nor ears, nor senses, but for her. He was, so to speak, ‘stricken’ by her majestic march, her awful brow, her graceful action, and her incomparable delivery. He drank at a fresh fountain; he beheld a new guiding light; he went home in a trance; he now knew what was meant by ‘the stage,’ what acting was, what appropriate speech meant, what it was to be an actor, and what a delicious reward there was for an inspired artist in the music of tumultuous applause. When Master Betty awoke from his dream it was to announce to his parents that he should certainly die if he were not allowed to be a play-actor!

He was only eleven years old, and those parents did not wish to lose him. They at first humoured his bent, and listened smilingly to his rehearsal of the whole part of Elvira. They had to listen to other parts, and still had to hear his impressive iteration of his resolution to die if he were thwarted in his views. At length they yielded. The father addressed himself to Mr. Atkins, the proprietor and manager of the Belfast theatre, who consented that the boy should give him a taste of his quality. When this was done, Atkins was sufficiently struck by its novelty not to know exactly what to make of it. He called into council Hough, the prompter, who was warm in his approval. ‘You are my guardian angel!’ exclaimed the excited boy to the old prompter. Atkins, with full faith in Hough’s verdict, observed, when the lad had left, ‘I never expected to see another Garrick, but I have seen an infant Garrick in Master Betty!’

After some preliminary bargaining, Atkins would not go further than engage the promising ‘infant’ for four nights. The terms were that, after deducting twelve pounds for the expenses of the house, the rest was to be divided between the manager and the débutant. The tragedy of ‘Zara’ was accordingly announced for August 16, 1803, ‘Osman (Sultan of Jerusalem) by a Young Gentleman.’ Now, that year (and several before and after it) was a troubled year, part of a perilous time, for Ireland. Sedition was abroad, and everybody, true man or not, was required to be at home early. The manager could not have got his tragedy and farce ended and his audience dismissed to their homes within the legal time but for the order which he obtained from the military commander of the district that (as printed in the bill), ‘At the request of the manager the drums have been ordered to beat an hour later at night.’ The performance was further advertised ‘to begin precisely at six o’clock, that the theatre may be closed by nine.’ The prices were reckoned by the Irish equivalent of English shillings—‘Boxes, 3s. 3d.; Pit, 2s. 2d.; Gallery, 1s. 1d.’ In return for the military courtesy, if not as a regular manifestation of loyalty, it was also stated in the bill, ‘God save the King’ (in capital letters!) ‘will be played at the end of the second act, and Rule Britannia at the end of the play.’

Belfast was, as it is, an intellectual town. The audience assembled were not likely to be carried away by a mere phenomenon. They listened, became interested, then deeply stirred, and at last enthusiastic. The next day the whole town was talking of the almost perfection with which this boy represented the rage, jealousy, and despair of Osman. In truth, there was something more than cleverness in this representation. Let anyone, if he can, read Aaron Hill’s adaptation of Voltaire’s ‘Zaire’ through. He will see of what dry bones it is made. Those heavy lines, long speeches, dull movement of dull plot, stirred now and then by a rant or a roar, require a great deal more than cleverness to make them endurable. No human being could live out five acts of such stuff if genius did not uphold the stuff itself. It was exquisite Mrs. Cibber who gave ‘Zara’ life when she made her début on the stage, when the tragedy was first played in 1736. Spranger Barry added fresh vigour to that life when he acted Osman in 1751. Garrick’s genius in Lusignan galvanised the dead heap into living beauty, never more so than in his last performance in 1776; but the great genius was Mrs. Cibber; neither Mrs. Bellamy, nor Mrs. Barry, nor Miss Younge, equalled her. Mrs. Siddons, after them, made Zara live again, and was nearly equal to Mrs. Cibber. Since her time there has been neither a Zara, nor Lusignan, nor grown-up Osman, of any note; and nothing short of genius could make the dry bones live. Voltaire’s ‘Zaire’ is as dull as Hill’s, but it has revived, and been played at the Théâtre Français. But every character is well played, from Mounet Sully, who acts Orosmane, to Dupont Vernon, in Corasmin. The accomplished Berton plays Nerestan; and it is a lesson to actors only to hear Maubant deliver the famous lines beginning with ‘Mon Dieu, j’ai combattu.’

Mdlle. Sarah Bernhardt is the Zaire, and I can fancy her a French Cibber. She dies, however, on the stage too much in the horrible fashion of the ‘Sphinx’; but what attracts French audience is, that the piece abounds in passages which such audiences may hail in ecstasy or denounce in disgust. The passages are political, religious, and cunningly framed free-thinking passages. For these the audience waits, and signalises their coming by an enthusiasm of delight or an excess of displeasure.

At Belfast there was only the eleven-years-old Osman to enthral an audience. The rest were respectable players. It is not to be believed that such an audience would have been stirred as they were on that August night had there not been some mind behind the voice of the young débutant. He had never been on a stage before, had only once seen a play acted, had received only a few hints from the old prompter, yet he seemed to be the very part he represented. There were many doubters and disbelievers in Belfast, but they, for the most part, went to the theatre and were convinced. The three other parts he played were Douglas, Rolla, and, for his benefit on August 29, Romeo. From that moment he was ‘renowned,’ and his career certain of success.

While this boy snatched a triumph, there was another eagerly, painfully, yet hopefully and determinedly, struggling for one. This boy scarcely knew by what name to pass, for his mother was a certain Nance Carey, and his reputed father was one of two brothers, he did not know which, named Kean. This boy claimed in after years to be an illegitimate son of the Duke of Norfolk, and he referred, in a way, to this claim when he called his first child Howard. For Nance Carey the boy had no love. There was but one woman who was kind to him in his childhood, Miss Tidswell, of Drury Lane Theatre, and Edmund Kean used to say, ‘If she was not my mother, why was she kind to me?’ When I pass Orange Court, Leicester Square, I look with curiosity at the hole where he got a month’s schooling.

Born and dragged up, the young life experiences of Edmund Kean were exactly opposite to those of William Henry West Betty. He had indeed, because of his childish beauty, been allowed at three years old to stand or lie as Cupid in one of Noverre’s ballets; and he had, as an unlucky imp in the witches’ scene of ‘Macbeth,’ been rebuked by the offended John Kemble. Since then he had rolled or been kicked about the world. When Master Betty, at the age of eleven, or nearly twelve, was laying the foundations of his fortune at Belfast, Edmund Kean was fifteen, and had often laid himself to sleep on the lee side of a haystack, for want of wherewith to pay for a better lodging. He had danced and tumbled at fairs, and had sung in taverns; he had tramped about the country, carrying Nance Carey’s box of falbalas for sale; he had been over sea and land; he had joined Richardson’s booth company, and, at Windsor, it is said that George III. had heard him recite, and had expressed his approbation in the shape of two guineas, which Miss Carey took from him.

It was for the benefit of a mother so different from Master Betty’s mother that he recited in private families. It is a matter of history that by one of these recitations he inspired another boy, two years older than himself, with a taste for the stage and a determination to gain thereon an honourable position. This third boy was Charles Young. His son and biographer has told us, that as Charles was one evening at Christmas time descending the stairs of his father’s house full dressed for dessert—his father, a London surgeon, lived in rather high style—he saw a slatternly woman seated on one of the chairs in the hall, with a boy standing by her side dressed in fantastic garb, with the blackest and most penetrating eyes he had ever beheld in human head. His first impression was that the two were strolling gipsies who had come for medical advice. Charles Young, we are told, ‘was soon undeceived, for he had no sooner taken his place by his father’s side than, to his surprise, the master, instead of manifesting displeasure, smirked and smiled, and, with an air of self-complacent patronage, desired his butler to bring in the boy. On his entry he was taken by the hand, patted on the head, and requested to favour the company with a specimen of his histrionic ability. With a self-possession marvellous in one so young he stood forth, knitted his brows, hunched up one shoulder-blade, and with sardonic grin and husky voice spouted forth Gloster’s opening soliloquy in “Richard the Third.” He then recited selections from some of our minor British poets, both grave and gay; danced a hornpipe; sang songs, both comic and pathetic; and, for fully an hour, displayed such versatility as to elicit vociferous applause from his auditory and substantial evidence of its sincerity by a shower of crown pieces and shillings, a napkin having been opened and spread upon the floor for their reception. The accumulated treasury having been poured into the gaping pockets of the lad’s trousers, with a smile of gratified vanity and grateful acknowledgment he withdrew, rejoined his tatterdemalion friend in the hall, and left the house rejoicing. The door was no sooner closed than the guests desired to know the name of the youthful prodigy who had so astonished them. The host replied that this was not the first time he had had him to amuse his friends; that he knew nothing of the lad’s history or antecedents, but that his name was Edmund Kean, and that of the woman who seemed to have charge of him and was his supposititious mother, Carey.’ This pretty scene, described by the Rev. Julian Young, had a supplement to it of which he was not aware. ‘She took all from me,’ was Edmund Kean’s cry when he used to tell similar incidents of his hard youthful times.

While Edmund was thus struggling, Master Betty had leaped into fame. Irish managers were ready to fight duels for the possession of him. When the announcement went forth that Mr. Frederick Jones, of the Crow Street Theatre, Dublin, was the possessor of the youthful phenomenon for nine nights, there was a rush of multitudes to secure places, with twenty times more applicants than places. There was ferocious fighting for what could be secured, and much spoliation, with peril of life and damage to limb, and an atmosphere filled with thunder and lightning, delightful to the Dublin mind.

On November 29, 1803, Master Betty, not in his own name, but simply as a ‘young gentleman, only twelve years of age,’ made his début in Dublin as Douglas. The play-bill, indeed, did add, ‘his admirable talents have procured him the deserved appellation of the Infant Roscius.’ As there were sensitive people in Dublin who remembered that Dublin itself was in what would now be called a state of siege, and that it was unlawful to be out after a certain hour in the evening, these were won over by this delicious announcement: ‘The public are respectfully informed that no person coming from the theatre will be stopped till after eleven o’clock.’ This was the time, too, when travellers were induced to trust themselves to mail and stagecoaches by the assurance that the vehicles were made proof against shot. There was no certainty the travellers would not be fired at, but the comfort was that if the bullets did not go through the window and kill the travellers, they could not much injure the vehicle itself!

There was the unheard-of sum of four hundred pounds in that old Crow Street Theatre on that November night. The university students in the gallery, who generally made it rattle with their wit, were silent as soon as the curtain rose. The Dublin audience was by no means an audience easy to please, or one that would befool itself by passing mediocrity with the stamp of genius upon it. ‘Douglas,’ too, is a tragedy that must be attentively listened to, to be enjoyed, and enjoyment is out of the question if the poetry of the piece be a lost beauty to the deliverer of the lines. On this night, Dublin ratified the Belfast verdict. The graceful boy excited the utmost enthusiasm, and the manager offered him an engagement at an increasing salary, for any number of years. The offer was wisely declined by Master Betty’s father, and the ‘Infant Roscius’ went on his bright career. He played one other part, admirably suited to him in every respect, Prince Arthur, in ‘King John,’ and he fairly drowned the house in tears with it. Frederick, in ‘Lovers’ Vows,’ and Romeo, were only a trifle beyond his age, not at all beyond his grasp, though love-making was the circumstance which he could the least satisfactorily portray. A boy sighing like furnace to young beauty must have seemed as ridiculous as a Juliet of fifty, looking older than the Nurse, and who, one would think, ought to be ashamed of herself to be out in a balcony at that time of night, talking nonsense with that young fellow with a feather in his cap and a sword on his thigh! Dublin wits made fun of Master Betty’s wooing, and were epigrammatic upon it in the style of Martial, and saucy actresses seized the same theme to air their saucy wit. These casters of stones from the roadside could not impede the boy’s triumph. He produced immense effect, even in Thomson’s dreary ‘Tancred,’ but I am sorry to find it asserted that he acted Hamlet, after learning the part in three days. The great Betterton, greatest of the great masters of their art, used to say that he had acted Hamlet and studied it for fifty years, and had not got to the bottom of its philosophy even then. However, the boy’s remarkable gifts made his Hamlet successful. There was a rare comedian who played with him, Richard Jones, with a cast in one eye. Accomplished Dick, whose only serious fault was excess in peppermint lozenges, acted Osric, Count Cassel, and Mercutio, in three of the pieces in which Master Betty played the principal characters. What a glorious true comedian was Dick! After delighting a whole generation with his comedy, Jones retired. He taught clergymen to read the Lord’s Prayer as if they were in earnest, and to deliver the messages of the Gospel as if they believed in them; and in this way Dick Jones did as much for the church as any of the bishops or archbishops of his time.

It is to be noted here that Master Betty’s first appearance in Dublin in 1803 was a more triumphant matter than John Kemble’s in 1781. This was in the older Smock Alley Theatre. The alley was so called from the Sallys who most did congregate there. He played high comedy as well as tragedy; but, says Mr. Gilbert, in his ‘History of Dublin,’ ‘his negligent delivery and heaviness of deportment impeded his progress until these defects were removed by the instruction of his friend, Captain Jephson.’ Is not this delicious? Fancy John Kemble being made an actor by a half-pay captain who had written a tragedy! This tragedy was called the ‘Count of Narbonne,’ and therein, says Gilbert, ‘Kemble’s reputation was first established.’ It was not on a very firm basis, for John was engaged only on the modest salary of 5l. a week!

Master Betty’s progress through the other parts of Ireland was as completely successful as at Dublin and Belfast. Mrs. Pero engaged him for six nights at Cork. His terms here were one-fourth of the receipts and one clear benefit, that is to say, the whole of the receipts free of expense. As the receipts rarely exceeded ten pounds, the prospects were not brilliant. But, with Master Betty, the ‘houses’ reached one hundred pounds. The smaller receipts may have arisen from a circumstance sufficient to keep an audience away. There was a Cork tailor hanged for robbery; but, after he was cut down, a Cork actor, named Glover, succeeded, by friction and other means, in bringing him to life again! On the same night, and for many nights, the tailor, drunk and unhanged, would go to the theatre and publicly acknowledge the service of Mr. Glover in bringing him to life again! And it is said that he was the third tailor who had outlived hanging during ten years!

There was no ghastly interruption of the performance of the Roscius. The engagement was extended to nine nights, and the one which followed at Waterford was equally successful. As he proceeded, Master Betty studied and extended his répertoire. He added to his list Octavian, and on his benefit nights he played in the farce, on one occasion Don Carlos in ‘Lovers’ Quarrels,’ on another Captain Flash in ‘Miss in her Teens.’ Subsequently, in Londonderry, the flood of success still increasing, the pit could only be entered at box prices. Master Betty played in Londonderry long before the time when a Mr. MacTaggart, an old citizen, used to be called upon between the acts to give his unbiassed critical opinions on the performances. It was the rarest fun for the house, and the most painful wholesomeness for the actors, Frank Connor and his father, Villars, Fitzsimons, Cunningham, O’Callaghan, and clever Miss M’Keevor (with her pretty voice and sparkling one eye), to hear the stern and salubrious criticism of Mr. MacTaggart, at the end of which there was a cry for the tune of ‘No Surrender!’ Not to wound certain susceptibilities, and yet be national, the key-bugle gentleman, who was half the orchestra, generally played ‘Norah Creena,’ and thus the play proceeded merrily.

Master Betty played Zanga at Londonderry, and he passed thence to Glasgow, where for fourteen nights he attracted crowded audiences, and added to his other parts Richard the Third, which he must have learnt as he sailed from Belfast up the Clyde. Jackson, the manager, went all but mad with delight and full houses. He wrote an account of his new treasure in terms more transcendent than ‘the transcendent boy’ himself could accept. Had Young Roscius been a divinity descended upon earth, the rhapsody could not have been more highly pitched; but it was fully endorsed by nine-tenths of the Glasgow people, and when a bold fellow ventured to write a satirical philippic against the divine idol of the hour, he was driven out of the city as guilty of something like sacrilege, profanation, and general unutterable wickedness.

On May 21, 1804, the transcendental Mr. Jackson was walking on the High Bridge, Edinburgh, when he met an old gentleman of some celebrity, the Rev. Mr. Home. ‘Sir,’ said Jackson, ‘your play, “Douglas,” is to be acted to-night with a new and wonderful actor. I hope you will come down to the house.’ Forty-eight years before (1756) Home had gone joyously down to the Edinburgh Theatre to see his ‘Douglas’ represented for the first time. West Digges (not Henry West Betty) was the Norval, and the house was half full of ministers of the Kirk, who got into a sea of troubles for presuming to see acted a play written by a fellow in the ministry.

The Lady Randolph was Mrs. Ward, daughter of a player of the Betterton period, and mother, I think, of Mrs. Roger Kemble. On that night one enthusiastic Scotsman was so delighted that at the end of the fourth act he arose and roared aloud, ‘Where’s Wully Shakespeare noo?’ Home had also seen Spranger Barry in the hero (he was the original Norval (Douglas) on the play being first acted in 1757 in London). Home was an aged man in 1804, and lived in retirement. He did not know his ‘Douglas’ was to be played, nor had he ever heard of Master Betty! Never heard of him whom Jackson said he had been presented to Earth by Heaven and Nature! ‘The pleasing movements of his perfect and divine nature,’ said Jackson, ‘were incorporated in his person previous to his birth.’ Home could not refuse to go and see this phenomenon. He stipulated to have his old place at the wing, that is, behind the stage door, partially opened, so that he could see up the stage. The old man was entirely overcome. Digges and Barry, he declared, were leather and prunella compared with this inspired child who acted his Norval as he the author had conceived it. Home’s enthusiasm was so excited that, when Master Betty was summoned by the ‘thunders’ of applause and the ‘hurricane’ of approbation to appear before the audience, Home tottered forward also, tears streaming from his eyes, and rapture beaming on his venerable countenance. The triumph was complete. The most impartial critics especially praised the boy’s conception of the poet, and it was the highest praise they could give. Between June 28 and August 9 he acted fifteen times, often under the most august patronage that could be found in Edinburgh. For the first time he played Selim (Achmet) in ‘Barbarossa’ during this engagement, and with such effect as to make him more the ‘darling’ than ever of duchesses and ladies in general. Four days after the later date named above, the marvellous boy stood before a Birmingham audience, whither he had gone covered with kisses from Scottish beauties, and laden with the approval, counsel, and blessing of Lords of Session.

Mr. Macready, father of the lately deceased actor, bargained for the Roscius, and overreached himself. He thought 10l. a night too much! He proposed that he should deduct 60l. from each night’s receipts, and that Master Betty should take half of what remained. The result was that Roscius got 50l. nightly instead of 10l. The first four nights were not overcrowded, but the boy grew on the town, and at last upon the whole country. Stage-coaches were advertised specially to carry parties from various distances to the Birmingham Theatre. The highest receipt was 266l. to his Richard. Selim was the next. 261l. The lowest receipt was also to his Richard. On the first night he played it there was only 80l. in the house. He left Birmingham with the assurance of a local poet that he was Cooke, Kemble, Holman, Garrick, all in one. Sheffield was delighted to have him at raised prices of admission. He made his first appearance to deliver a rhymed deprecatory address, in reference to wide-cast ridicule on his being a mere boy, in which were these lines:

When at our Shakespeare’s shrine my swelling heart

Bursts forth and claims some kindred tear to start,

Frown not, if I avow that falling tear

Inspires my soul and bids me persevere.

His Hamlet drew the highest sum at Sheffield, 140l.; his Selim the lowest, 60l., which was just doubled when he played the same part for his own benefit. London had caught curiosity, if not enthusiasm, to see him; the Sheffield hotels became crowded with London families, and ‘Six-inside coaches to see the Young Roscius’ plied at Doncaster to carry people from the races. At Liverpool there were riots and spoliation at the box-office. At Chester wild delight. At Manchester tickets were put up to lottery. At Stockport he played morning and evening, and travelled after it all night to play at Leicester, where he also acted on some occasions twice in one day! and where every lady who could write occasional verses showered upon him a very deluge of rhyme.

November had now been reached. In that month John Kemble, who is supposed to have protested against the dignity of the stage being lowered by a speaking puppet, wrote a letter to Mr. Betty. In this letter John said: ‘I could not deny myself the satisfaction I feel in knowing I shall soon have the happiness of welcoming you and Master Betty to Covent Garden Theatre. Give me leave to say how heartily I congratulate the stage on the ornament and support it is, by the judgment of all the world, to receive from Master Betty’s extraordinary talents and exertions.’ After this we may dismiss as nonsense the lofty talk about the Kemble feeling as to the dignity of the stage being wounded. Mr. Kemble and Mrs. Siddons would not play in the same piece with Master Betty, as Jones, Charles Young, Miss Smith (Mrs. Bartley), and others had done in the country, but Mr. Kemble (as manager) was delighted that the Covent Garden treasury should profit by the extraordinary talents of a boy whom the Kemble followers continually depreciated.

On Saturday, December 1, 1804, Master Betty appeared at Covent Garden in the character of Selim. Soon after mid-day the old theatre—the one which Rich had built and to which he transferred his company from Lincoln’s Inn Fields—was beset by a crowd which swelled into a multitude, not one in ten of whom succeeded in fighting his way into the house when the doors were opened. Such a struggle—sometimes for life—had never been known. Even in the house strong men fainted like delicate girls; an hour passed before the shrieks of the suffering subsided, and we are even told that ‘the ladies in one or two boxes were employed almost the whole night in fanning the gentlemen who were behind them in the pit!’ The only wonder is that the excited multitude, faint for want of air, irritable by being overcrowded, and fierce in struggling for space which no victor in the struggle could obtain, ever was subdued to a condition of calm sufficient to enable them to enjoy the ‘rare delight’ within reach. However, in the second act Master Betty appeared—modest, self-possessed, and not at all moved out of his assumed character by the tempest of welcome which greeted him. From first to last, he ‘electrified’ the audience. He never failed, we are told, whenever he aimed at making a point. His attention to the business of the stage was that of a careful and conscientious veteran. His acting denoted study. His genius won applause—not his age, and youthful grace. There was ‘conception,’ rather than ‘instruction’ to be seen in all he did and said. His undertones could be heard at the very back of the galleries. The pathos, the joy, the exultation of a part (once so favourite a part with young actors), enchanted the audience. That they felt all these things sincerely is proved by the fact that—as one newspaper critic writes—‘the audience could not lower their minds to attend to the farce, which was not suffered to be concluded.’

The theatrical career of his ‘Young Roscius’ period amounted to this. He played at both houses in London from December 1804 to April 1805, in a wide range of characters, and supported by some of the first actors of the day. He then played in every town of importance throughout England and Scotland. He returned to London for the season 1805-6, and acted twenty-four nights at each theatre, at fifty guineas a night. Subsequently he acted in the country; and finally, he took leave of the stage at Bath in March 1808. Altogether, London possessed him but a few months. The madness which prevailed about him was ‘midsummer madness,’ though it was but a short fit. That he himself did not go mad is the great wonder. Princes of the blood called on him, the Lord Chancellor invited him, nobles had him day after day to dinner, and the King presented him to the Queen and Princesses in the room behind the Royal box. Ladies carried him off to the Park as those of Charles II.’s time did with Kynaston. When he was ill the sympathetic town rushed to read his bulletins with tremulous eagerness. Portraits of him abounded, presents were poured in upon him, poets and poetasters deafened the ear about him, misses patted his beautiful hair and asked ‘locks’ from him. The future King of France and Navarre, Count d’Artois, afterwards Charles X., witnessed his performance, in French, of ‘Zaphna,’ at Lady Percival’s; Gentleman Smith presented him with Garrick relics; Cambridge University gave ‘Roscius’ as the subject for the Brown Prize Medal, and the House of Commons adjourned, at the request of Pitt, in order to witness his ‘Hamlet.’ At the Westminster Latin Play (the ‘Adelphi’ of Terence) he was present in a sort of royal state, and the Archbishop of York all but publicly blest him. Some carping persons remarked that the boy was too ignorant to understand a word of the play that was acted in his presence. When it is remembered how Latin was and is pronounced at Westminster, it is not too much to say that Terence (had he been there) would not have understood much more of his own play than Master Betty did.

The boy reigned triumphantly through his little day, and the professional critics generally praised to the skies his mental capacity as well as his bodily endowments. They discovered beauty in both, and it is to the boy’s credit that their praise did not render him conceited. He studied new parts, and his attention to business, his modesty, his boyish spirits in the green room, his docility, and the respect he paid to older artists, were among the items of the professional critic’s praise.

Let us pass from the professional critics to the judgment of private individuals of undoubted ability to form and give one (we have only to premise that Master Betty played alternately at Covent Garden and Drury Lane). And first, Lord Henley. Writing to Lord Auckland, on December 7, 1804, he says, ‘I went to see the Young Roscius with an unprejudiced mind, or rather, perhaps, with the opinion you seem to have formed of him, and left the theatre in the highest admiration of his wonderful talents. As I scarcely remember Garrick, I may say (though there be, doubtless, room for improvement) that I never saw such fine acting, and yet the poor boy’s voice was that night a good deal affected by a cold. I would willingly pay a guinea for a place on every night of his appearing in a new character.’

Even Fox, intent as he was on public business, and absorbed by questions of magnitude concerning his country, and of importance touching himself, was caught by the general enthusiasm. There is a letter of his, dated December 17, 1804, addressed to his ‘Dear Young One,’ Lord Holland, who was then about thirty years old. The writer urges his nephew to hasten from Spain to England, on account of the serious parliamentary struggle likely to occur; adding, ‘there is always a chance of questions in which the Prince of Wales is particularly concerned;’ and subjoining the sagacious statesmanlike remark: ‘It is very desirable that the power, strength, and union of the Opposition should appear considerable while out of office, in order that if ever they should come in it may be plain that they have an existence of their own, and are not the mere creatures of the Crown.’ But Fox breaks suddenly away from subjects of crafty statesmanship, with this sentence: ‘Everybody here is mad about this Boy Actor, even Uncle Dick is full of astonishment and admiration. We go to town to-morrow to see him, and from what I have heard, I own I shall be disappointed if he is not a prodigy.’

On the same day Fox wrote a letter from St. Anne’s Hill to the Hon. C. Grey (the Lord Grey of the Reform Bill). It is bristling with ‘politicks,’ but between reference to party battles and remarks on Burke, the statesman says: ‘Everybody is mad about this Young Roscius, and we go to town to-morrow to see him. The accounts of him seem incredible; but the opinion of him is nearly unanimous, and Fitzpatrick, who went strongly prepossessed against him, was perfectly astonished and full of admiration.’

We do not find any letter of Fox’s extant to tell us his opinion of the ‘tenth wonder.’ We can go with him to the play, nevertheless. ‘While young Betty was in all his glory,’ says Samuel Rogers, in his ‘Table Talk,’ ‘I went with Fox and Mrs. Fox, after dining with them in Arlington Street, to see him act Hamlet; and, during the play scene, Fox, to my infinite surprise, said, “This is finer than Garrick!”’ Fox would not have said so if he had not thought so. He did not say as much to Master Betty, but he best proved his sympathy by sitting with and reading to him passages from the great dramatists, mingled with excellent counsel.

Windham, the famous statesman, who as much loved to see a pugilistic fight as Fox did to throw double sixes, and to whom a stroll in Leicester Fields was as agreeable as an hour with an Italian poet was to Fox—Windham hurried through the Fields to Covent Garden. His diary for the year 1804 is lost; but in that for 1805 we come upon his opinion of the attractive player, after visits in both years. On January 31, 1805, there is this entry in his diary;—‘Went, according to arrangement, with Elliot and Grenville to play; Master Betty in Frederick’ (‘Lovers’ Vows’). ‘Lord Spencer, who had been shooting at Osterley, came afterwards. Liked Master B. better than before, but still inclined to my former opinion; his action certainly very graceful, except now and then that he is a little tottering on his legs, and his recitation just, but his countenance not expressive; his voice neither powerful nor pleasing.’

The criticisms of actors were generally less favourable. Kemble was ‘riveted,’ we are told, by the acting of Master Betty; but he was contemptuously silent. Mrs. Siddons, according to Campbell, ‘never concealed her disgust at the popular infatuation.’ At the end of the play Lord Abercorn came into her box and told her that that boy, Betty, would eclipse everything which had been called acting, in England. ‘My Lord,’ she answered, ‘he is a very clever, pretty boy; but nothing more.’ Mrs. Siddons, however, was meanly jealous of all that stood between her and the public. When Mrs. Siddons was young, she was jealous of grand old Mrs. Crawford. When Mrs. Siddons was old, and had retired, she was jealous of young Miss O’Neill. She querulously said that the public were fond of setting up new idols in order to annoy their former favourites. George Frederick Cooke who had played Glenalvon to Master Betty’s Norval—played it finely too, at his very best—and could not crush the boy, after whom everybody was repeating the line he made so famous,

The blood of Douglas can protect itself!

—Cooke alluded to him in his diary, for 1811, thus: ‘I was visited by Master Payne, the American Young Roscius; I thought him a polite, sensible youth, and the reverse of our Young Roscius.’ This was an ebullition of irritability. Even those who could not praise Roscius as a tenth wonder, acknowledged his courtesy and were struck by his good common sense. Boaden, who makes the singular remark that ‘all the favouritism, and more than the innocence, of former patronesses was lavished on him,’ also tells us more intelligibly, that Master Betty ‘never lost the genuine modesty of his carriage; and his temper, at least, was as steady as his diligence.’ One actor said, ‘Among clever boys he would have been a Triton among minnows;’ but Mrs. Inchbald remarked, ‘Had I never seen boys act, I might have thought him extraordinary.’ ‘Baby-faced child!’ said Campbell. ‘Handsome face! graceful figure! marvellous power!’ is the testimony of Mrs. Mathews. The most unbiassed judgment I can find is Miss Seward’s, who wrote thus of him in 1804, after seeing him as Osman in ‘Zara’: ‘It could not have been conceived or represented with more grace, sensibility, and fire, though he is veritably an effeminate boy of thirteen; but his features are cast in a diminutive mould, particularly his nose and mouth. This circumstance must at every period of life be injurious to stage effect; nor do I think his ear for blank verse faultless. Like Cooke, he never fails to give the passions their whole force, by gesture and action natural and just; but he does not do equal justice to the harmony. It is, I think, superfluous to look forward to the mature fruit of this luxuriant blossom.’ Miss Seward was right; but she was less correct in her prophecy, ‘He will not live to bear it. Energies various and violent will blast in no short time the vital powers, evidently delicate.’ He survived this prophecy just seventy years! One other opinion of him I cannot forbear adding. It is Elliston’s, and it is in the very loftiest of Robert William’s manner, who was born a little more than one hundred years ago! ‘Sir, my opinion of the young gentleman’s talents will never transpire during my life. I have written my convictions down. They have been attested by competent witnesses, and sealed and deposited in the iron safe at my banker’s, to be drawn forth and opened, with other important documents, at my death. The world will then know what Mr. Elliston thought of Master Betty!’

The Young Roscius withdrew from the stage and entered Christ’s College, Cambridge. He there enjoyed quiet study and luxurious seclusion. Meanwhile that once boy with the flashing eyes, Edmund Kean, had got a modest post at the Haymarket, where he played Rosencrantz to Mr. Rae’s Hamlet. He had also struggled his way to Belfast, and had acted Osman to Mrs. Siddons’ Zara. ‘He plays well, very well,’ said the lady: ‘but there is too little of him to make a great actor.’ Edmund, too, had married ‘Mary Chambers,’ at Stroud, and Mr. Beverley had turned the young couple out of his company, ‘to teach them not to do it again!’ In 1812, ‘Mr. Betty,’ come to man’s estate, returned to the stage, at Bath. A few months previously Mr. and Mrs. Kean were wandering from town to town. In rooms, to which the public were invited by written bills, in Kean’s hand, they recited scenes from plays and sang duets; and he trilled songs, spoke soliloquies, danced hornpipes, and gave imitations!—and starved, and hoped—and would by no means despair.

Mr. Betty’s second career lasted from 1812 to 1824, when he made his last bow at Southampton, as the Earl of Warwick. Within the above period he acted at Covent Garden, in 1812 and 1813. He proved to be a highly ‘respectable’ actor; but the phenomenon no longer existed. His last performance in London was in June 1813, when he played ‘Richard III.’ and ‘Tristram Fickle’ for his benefit. In the following January Edmund Kean, three years his senior, took the town by storm in Shylock, and made his conquest good by his incomparable Richard. The genius of Mr. Betty left him with his youth. Edmund Kean drowned his genius in wine and rioting before his manhood was matured. Forty-eight years have elapsed since he was carried to his grave in Richmond churchyard. Honoured and regretted, all that was mortal of the once highly-gifted boy, who lived to be a venerable and much-loved old man, ‘fourscore years and upwards,’ was borne to his last resting-place in the cemetery at Highgate. Requiescat in pace!

CHARLES YOUNG AND HIS TIMES.

Charles Mayne Young, one of the last of the school of noble actors, has found a biographer in his son, the Rev. Julian Young, Rector of Ilmington. Here we have stage and pulpit in happy and not unusual propinquity. There was a time when the clergy had the drama entirely to themselves; they were actors, authors, and managers. The earliest of them all retired to the monastery of St. Alban, after his theatre at Dunstable had been burnt down, at the close of a squib-and-rocket sort of drama on the subject of St. Theresa. At the Reformation the stage became secularised, the old moralities died out, and the new men and pieces were denounced as wicked by the ‘unco righteous’ among their dramatic clerical predecessors. Nevertheless, the oldest comedy of worldly manners we possess—‘Ralph Roister Doister’—was the work of the Rev. Dr. Nicholas Udall, in 1540. During the three centuries and nearly a half which have elapsed since that time, clergymen have ranked among the best writers for the stage. The two most successful tragedies of the last century were the Rev. Dr. Young’s ‘Revenge,’ and the Rev. J. Home’s ‘Douglas.’ In the present century few comedies have made such a sensation as the Rev. Dr. Croly’s ‘Pride shall have a Fall,’ but the sensation was temporary, the comedy only illustrating local and contemporary incidents.

A dozen other ‘Reverends’ might be cited who have more or less adorned dramatic literature, and there are many instances of dramatic artists whose sons or less near kinsmen having taken orders in the Church. When Sutton, in the pulpit of St. Mary Overy, A.D. 1616, denounced the stage, Nathaniel Field, the eminent actor, published a letter to the preacher, in which Field said that in the player’s trade there were corruptions as there were in all others; he implied, as Overbury implied, that the actor was not to be judged by the dross of the craft, but by the purer metal. Field anticipated Fielding’s Newgate Chaplain, who upheld ‘Punch’ on the same ground that the comedian upheld the stage—that it was nowhere spoken against in Scripture! The year 1616 was the year in which Shakespeare died. It is commonly said that the players of Shakespeare’s time were of inferior birth and culture, but Shakespeare himself was of a well-conditioned family, and this Nathaniel Field who stood up for the honour of the stage against the censure of the pulpit, had for brother that Rev. Theophilus Field who was successively Bishop of Llandaff, St. David’s, and Hereford. Charles Young was not the only actor of his day who gave a son to the Church. His old stage-manager at Bath, Mr. Charlton, saw not only his son but his grandsons usefully employed in the more serious vocation. As for sons of actors at the universities, they have seldom been wanting, from William Hemming (son of John Hemming, the actor, and joint-editor with Condell of the folio edition of Shakespeare’s Works), who took his degree at Oxford in 1628, down to Julian Charles Young, son of the great tragedian, who took his degree in the same university two centuries later; or, to be precise, A.D. 1827.

Charles Mayne Young, who owed his second name to the circumstance of his descent from the regicide who was so called, was born in Fenchurch Street, in 1777. His father was an able surgeon and a reckless spendthrift. Before the household fell into ruin, Charles Young had passed a holiday year, partly at the Court of Copenhagen. He had seen a boy with flashing eyes play bits from Shakespeare before the guests at his father’s table—a strolling, fantastically-dressed, intellectual boy, whose name was Edmund Kean. Further, Charles Young saw and appreciated, at the age of twelve, Mrs. Siddons as the mother of Coriolanus. He also passed through Eton and Merchant Taylors’. When the surgeon’s household was broken up, and Young and his two brothers took their ill-used mother to their own keeping, they adopted various courses for her and their own support, and all of them succeeded. Charles Young, after passing a restless novitiate in a merchant’s office (the more restless, probably, as he thought of two personages—the bright, gipsy-looking boy who had acted in his father’s dining-room, and the Volumnia of Mrs. Siddons, as she triumphed in the tragedy of Coriolanus), went upon the stage, triumphed in his turn, and assumed the sole guardianship and support of the mother he loved.

Young’s father was a remarkably detestable person. He never seems to have forgiven his sons for the affection which they manifested towards their mother. After the separation of the parents, George Young, the eldest son, was in a stage-coach going to Hackney; on the road, a stranger got in, took the only vacant seat, and, on seeing George Young opposite to him, struck him a violent blow in the face. George quietly called to the coachman to stop, and without exchanging a word with the stranger, got out, to the amazement of the other passengers. But, as he closed the door, he looked in and simply said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, that is my father!’ In 1807, when Charles Young made his first appearance in London, at the Haymarket, as Hamlet, his father sat ensconced in a corner of the house, and hissed him! Neither the blow nor the hiss did more than momentarily wound the feelings of the sons.

Before Young came up to London, he had seen some of the sunshine and some of the bitterness of life. He married the young, beautiful, and noble woman and actress, Julia Grimani. They had a brief, joyous, married time of little more than a year, when the birth of a son was the death of the mother. For the half-century that Young survived her no blandishment of woman ever led him to be untrue to her memory. To look with tears on her miniature-portrait, to touch tenderly some clustered locks of her hair, to murmur some affectionate word of praise, and, finally, to thank God that he should soon be with her, showed how young heart-feelings had survived in old heart-memories.

Charles Young adorned the English stage from 1807 to 1832. Because he acted with the Kembles he is sometimes described as being of the Kemble school. In a great theatre the leading player is often imitated throughout the house. There was a time when everybody employed at Drury Lane seemed a double of Mr. Macready. Charles Young, however, was an original actor. It took him but five years to show that he was equal in some characters to John Kemble himself. This was seen in 1812, in his Cassius to Kemble’s Brutus. On that occasion Terry is said to have been the Casca—a part which was really played by Fawcett. About ten years later, Young left the Covent Garden company and 25l. a week, for Drury Lane and 50l. a night, to play in the same pieces with Kean. The salary proved that the manager thought him equal in attractiveness to Kean; and Kean was, undoubtedly, somewhat afraid of him. Young’s secession was as great a loss to the company he had been acting with, as Compton’s has been to the Haymarket company. In both cases, a perfect artist withdrew from the brotherhood.

Young was fifteen years upon the London stage before he could free himself from nervousness—nervousness, not merely like that of Mrs. Siddons, before going on, but when fairly in face of the audience. In 1826, he told Moore, at a dinner of the Anacreontics, that any close observer of his acting must have been conscious of a great improvement therein, dating from the previous four years. That is to say, dating from the time when he first played in the same piece with Edmund Kean. The encounter with that great master of his art seems to have braced Young’s nerves. Kean could not extinguish him as he extinguished Booth when those two acted together in the same play. Edmund, who spoke of Macready as ‘a player,’ acknowledged Young to be ‘an actor.’ Kean confessed Young’s superiority in Iago, and he could not bear to think of playing either that character or Pierre after him. Edmund believed in the greater merit of his own Othello. Young allowed that Kean had genius, but he was not enthusiastic in his praise; and Edmund, whose voice in tender passages was exquisite music, referred to the d——d musical voice of Young; and in his irritable moments spake of him as ‘that Jesuit!’

The greatest of Young’s original characters was his Rienzi. In Miss Mitford’s tragedy, Young pronounced ‘Rome’ Room. Many old play-goers can recollect how ill the word fell from his musical lips. John Kemble would never allow an actor in his company to give other utterance to the monosyllable. It was a part of the vicious and fantastic utterances of the Kemble family. Leigh Hunt has furnished a long list of them. Shakespeare, indeed, has ‘Now it is Rome indeed, and room enough,’ as Cassius says. But in ‘Henry VI.,’ when Beaufort exclaims, ‘Rome shall remedy this!’ Warwick replies, ‘Roam thither, then!’ The latter jingle is far more common than the former. We agree with Genest, ‘Let the advocates for Room be consistent. If the city is Room, the citizens are certainly Roomans.’ They who would have any idea how John Kemble mutilated the pronunciation of the English language on the stage, have only to consult the appendix to Leigh Hunt’s ‘Critical Essays on the Performers of the London Theatres.’ Such pronunciation seems now more appropriate to burlesque than to Shakespeare.

When the idea was first started of raising a statue in honour of Kemble, Talma wrote to ‘mon cher Young,’ expressing his wish to be among the subscribers. ‘In that idea I recognise your countrymen,’ said Talma. ‘I shall be too fortunate here if the priests leave me a grave in my own garden.’ The Comte de Soligny, or the author who wrote under that name, justly said in his ‘Letters on England,’ that Young was unlike any actor on the stage. His ornamental style had neither model nor imitators. ‘I cannot help thinking,’ writes the Count, ‘what a sensation Young would have created had he belonged to the French instead of the English stage. With a voice almost as rich, powerful, and sonorous as that of Talma—action more free, flowing, graceful, and various; a more expressive face, and a better person—he would have been hardly second in favour and attraction to that grandest of living actors. As it is, he admirably fills up that place on the English stage which would have been a blank without him.’ This is well and truly said, and it is applicable to ‘Gentleman Young’ throughout his whole career—a period during which he played a vast variety of characters, from Hamlet to Captain Macheath. He was not one of those players who were always in character. Between the scenes of his most serious parts he would keep the green-room merry with his stories, and be serious again as soon as his part required him. Young’s modest farewell to the stage reminds us of Garrick’s. The latter took place on June 10, 1776. The play was ‘The Wonder,’ Don Felix by Garrick; with ‘The Waterman.’ The bill is simply headed, ‘The last time of the company’s performing this season,’ and it concludes with these words: ‘The profits of this night being appropriated to the benefit of the Theatrical Fund, the Usual Address upon that Occasion Will be spoken by Mr. Garrick before the Play.’ The bill is now before us, and not a word in it refers to the circumstance that it was the last night that Garrick would ever act, and that he would take final leave after the play. All the world was supposed to know it. The only intimation that something unusual was on foot is contained in the words, ‘Ladies are desired to send their servants a little after 5, to keep places, to prevent confusion.’ Garrick’s farewell speech is stereotyped in all dramatic memories. His letter to Clutterbuck in the previous January is not so familiar. He says, ‘I have at last slipt my theatrical shell, and shall be as fine and free a gentleman as you should wish to see upon the South or North Parade of Bath. I have sold my moiety of patent, &c., for 35,000l., to Messrs. Dr. Ford, Ewart, Sheridan, and Linley.... I grow somewhat older, though I never played better in all my life, and am resolved not to remain upon the stage to be pitied instead of applauded!’ Garrick was sixty years of age when he left the stage. Young was five years less. In his modest farewell speech, after the curtain had descended on his Hamlet, he said, ‘It has been asked why I retire from the stage while still in possession of whatever qualifications I could ever pretend to unimpaired. I will give you my motives, although I do not know you will accept them as reasons—but reason and feeling are not always cater-cousins. I feel then the toil and excitement of my calling weigh more heavily upon me than formerly; and, if my qualifications are unimpaired, so I would have them remain in your estimate.... I am loth to remain before my patrons until I have nothing better to present them than tarnished metal.’ Among Young’s after-enjoyments was that of music. We well remember his always early presence in the front row of the pit at the old Opera House, and the friendly greetings that used to be exchanged between him and Mori, Nicholson, Linley, Dragonetti, and other great instrumentalists, as they made their appearance in the orchestra.

Some theatrical impulses never abandoned him. During his retirement at Brighton, he was a constant attendant on the ministry of Mr. Sortain. ‘Mr. Bernal Osborne told me he was one day shown into the same pew with my father, whom he knew. He was struck with his devotional manner during the prayers and by his rapt attention during the sermon. But he found himself unable to maintain his gravity when, as the preacher paused to take breath after a long and eloquent outburst, the habits of the actor’s former life betrayed themselves, and he uttered in a deep undertone, the old familiar “Bravo!”’ As a sample of his cheerfulness of character, we may quote what Mr. Cole says of Young, in the life of Charles Kean:—‘Not long before he left London for his final residence at Brighton, he called, with one of his grandsons, to see the writer of these pages, who had long enjoyed his personal friendship, and who happened at the moment to be at dinner with his family. “Tell them,” he said to the servant, “not to hurry; but when they are at leisure, there are two little boys waiting to see them.”’

A quiet humour seems to have been among the characteristics of a life which generally was marked by unobtrusive simplicity and moral purity. A man who, when a boy, had been at Eton and Merchant Taylors’ could not have been ignorant of such a fact as the Punic War, though he may have forgotten the date. He was once turned to by a lady at table (she had been discussing history with the guest on her other side), and she suddenly asked Young to tell her the date of the Second Punic War. Young frankly replied in one of his most tragic tones; ‘Madam, I don’t know anything about the Punic War, and what is more, I never did! My inability to answer your question has wrung from me the same confession which I once heard made by a Lancashire farmer, with an air of great pride, when appealed to by a party of his friends in a commercial room, “I tell you what, in spite of all your bragging, I’ll wedger (wager) I’m th’ ignorantest man in t’ coompany!”’ There can be little doubt that many of the stories of mistakes made by actors may be traced to him. Among them, perhaps, that of the player who, invariably, for ‘poisoned cup,’ said ‘coisoned pup;’ and who, once pronouncing it correctly, was hissed for his pains. Thence too perhaps came the tale of him who, instead of saying,

How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is,

To have a thankless child,

exclaimed:

How sharper than a serpent’s thanks it is,

To have a toothless child.

Whatever may be the source of such stories, it is certain that Young’s criticisms of others were always clear and generous. A few words tell us of Mrs. Siddons’ Rosalind, that ‘it wanted neither playfulness nor feminine softness; but it was totally without archness, not because she did not properly conceive it—but how could such a countenance be arch?’ Some one has said more irreverently of her Rosalind, that it was like Gog in petticoats! Young looked back to the periods during which he had what he called ‘the good fortune to act with her, as the happiest of his own professional recollections.’ When he was a boy of twelve years of age (1789), he saw Mrs. Siddons in Volumnia (Coriolanus). Long after, he described her bearing in the triumphal procession in honour of her son in this wise: ‘She came alone marching and beating time to the music, rolling from side to side, swelling with the triumph of her son. Such was the intoxication of joy which flashed from her eye and lit up her whole face, that the effect was irresistible. She seemed to me to reap all the glory of that procession to herself. I could not take my eye from her. Coriolanus’ banner and pageant, all went for nothing to me, after she had walked to her place.’

We have spoken of the unobtrusive simplicity and the moral purity of this great actor’s life. Temptations sprang up about him. Young first appeared on the stage when the old drinking days had not yet come to an end. His name, however, never occurs among the annals of the fast and furious revelries. John Kemble belonged to the old school and followed its practices. He was not indeed fast and furious in his cups. He was solemnly drunken as became an earnest tragedian. It is somewhere told of him that he once went to Dicky Peake’s house half-cocked, at half-past nine P.M.; Sheridan, he said, had appointed to meet him there, and he would not neglect being in time for the world. Peake sat him down to wine with Dunn the treasurer: the three got exceedingly drunk, and all fell asleep, Kemble occupying the carpet. The tragedian was the first to wake. He arose, opened the window shutters, and dazzled by the morning sun-light roused his two companions, and wondered as to the time of day. They soon heard eight strike. ‘Eight!’ exclaimed Kemble; ‘this is too provoking of Sheridan; he is always late in keeping his appointments; I don’t suppose he will come at all now. If he should, tell him, my dear Dick, how long I waited for him!’ Therewith, exit John Philip, in a dreamy condition—leaving, at all events, some incidents out of which imaginative Dunn built this illustrative story.

Great writers in their own houses, like prophets among their own people, proverbially lack much of the consideration they find abroad. Mrs. Douglas Jerrold always wondered what it was people found in her husband’s jokes to laugh at. It is said that many years had passed over the head of Burns’s son before the young man knew that his father was famous as a poet. It is certain that Walter Scott’s eldest son had arrived at more than manhood before he had the curiosity to read one of his sire’s novels. He thought little of it when he had read it. This want of appreciation the son derived from his mother. Once, when Young was admiring the fashion of the ceiling, in Scott’s drawing-room at Abbotsford, Lady Scott exclaimed in her droll Guernsey accent, ‘Ah! Mr. Young, you may look up at the bosses in the ceiling, as long as you like, but you must not look down at my poor carpet, for I am ashamed of it. I must get Scott to write some more of his nonsense books and buy me a new one!’ To those who remember the charm of Young’s musical voice, Lady Dacre’s lines on his reciting ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ to the other guests at Abbotsford, will present themselves without any thought of differing from their conclusion, thus neatly put:—

And Tam o’ Shanter roaring fou,

By thee embodied to our view,

The rustic bard would own sae true,

He scant could tell

Wha ’twas the livin’ picture drew,

Thou or himsel’!

It is a curious fact that Scott, harmonious poet as he was, had no ear for music, unless it were that of a ballad, and he would repeat that horribly out of tune. He was, however, in tune with all humanity; as much so with a king as with the humblest of his subjects. When he went on board the royal yacht which had arrived near Leith, with George IV., amid such rain as only falls in Scotland, Scott, in an off-hand, yet respectful way, told the king that the weather reminded him of the stormy day of his own arrival in the Western Highlands, weather which so disgusted the landlord of the inn, who was used to the very worst, that he apologised for it. ‘Gude guide us! this is just awfu’! Siccan a downpour, was ever the like! I really beg your pardon! I’m sure it’s nae faut o’ mine. I canna think how it should happen to rain this way just as you o’ a’ men i’ the warld should come to see us! It looks amaist personal! I can only say, for my part, I’m just ashamed o’ the weather!’ Having thus spoken to the king, Scott added; ‘I do not know, sire, that I can improve upon the language of the honest innkeeper. I canna think how it should rain this way, just as your majesty, of all men in the world, should have condescended to come and see us. I can only say in the name of my countrymen, I’m just ashamed o’ the weather!’ It was at Scott’s petition that the royal landing was deferred till the next day, which brought all the sunshine that was considered necessary for the occasion.

It is singular to find Charles Mathews, senior, writing of himself; ‘I only perform for one rank of persons. The lower orders hate and avoid me, and the middle classes cannot comprehend me.’ He used to get fun enough out of his own man-servant, whose awe and pride at seeing a titled personage at his master’s house were amply stimulated by friends of Mathews who visited him under assumed dignities. Charles Kemble was always announced as the Persian Ambassador, Fawcett as Sir Francis Burdett, and Young as the Duke of Wellington. One day, a real Lord—Lord Ranelagh—called and sent in a message expressive of his desire to see Mathews. Mathews, supposing the visitor was a fellow-player passing as a peer, sent a reply that he was just then busy with Lord Vauxhall. When Mr. Julian Young once told Mathews he was going to Lord Dacres at the Hoo, the actor replied, Who? and thinking Bob Acres was raised to the peerage, begged to be remembered to Sir Lucius O’Trigger!

One of the most flattering kindnesses ever paid to the elder Mathews was when he was once standing among the crowd in a Court of Assize, where Judge Alan Park was presiding. His lordship sent a note down to him, requesting him to come and take a seat on the bench. The actor obeyed, and the judge was courteously attentive to him. Mathews was subsequently the guest of his old friend Mr. Rolls, at whose house in Monmouthshire the judge had previously been staying. The player asked if his lordship had alluded to him. ‘Yes,’ said Rolls, who proceeded to relate how Judge Park had been startled at seeing in court a fellow who was in the habit of imitating the voice and manners of the judges on the stage. Indeed, his imitation of Lord Ellenborough, in ‘Love, Law, and Physic,’ had well nigh brought the imitator to grief. Park said the presence of Mathews so troubled him that he invited the mimic to sit near him, and behaved so kindly that he hoped the actor, out of simple gratitude, would not include him in his Legal Portraits in comedy or farce.

Appreciation of the drama is neither strong nor clear in at least one part of the vicinity of Shakespeare’s native town. After the busy time of the ‘Tercentenary,’ Mr. Julian Young sent his servants to the theatre in Stratford. They had never been in a playhouse before. The piece represented was ‘Othello.’ On the following morning, wishing to know the effect of the drama on his servants’ minds, Mr. Julian Young questioned them in their several departments. The butler was impressed to this effect: ‘Thank you, sir, for the treat. The performers performed the performance which they had to perform excellent well—especially the female performers—in the performance.’ The more impulsive coachman, in the harness-room, exclaimed, ‘’Twas really beautiful, sir; I liked it onaccountable!’ But when he was asked what the play was about he frankly confessed he didn’t exactly know; but that it was very pretty, and was upon sweet-hearting! On a former occasion, when the gardener and his wife had been treated to the Bristol Theatre, their master, on the next day, asked, ‘Well, Robert, what did you see last night?’ The bewildered fellow replied, after a pause, ‘Well, sir, I saw what you sent me to see!’ ‘What was that?’ ‘Why, the play, in course.’ ‘Was it a tragedy or a comedy?’ ‘I don’t know what you mane. I can’t say no more than I have said, nor no fairer! All I know is there was a precious lot on ’em on the theayter stage; and there they was, in and out, and out and in again!’ The wife had more definite ideas. She was all for the second piece, she said, ‘The pantrymine, and what I liked best in it was where the fool fellar stooped down and grinned at we through his legs!’ Good creature! after all, her taste was in tune with that of King George III., who thought Garrick fidgety, and who laughed himself into fits at the clown who could get a whole bunch of carrots into his mouth, and apparently swallow them, with supplementary turnips to make them go down! The gardener’s wife, therefore, need not be ashamed. She is not half so much called upon to blush as the wife of the treasurer of Drury Lane Theatre, who was one of a score of professional ladies and gentlemen dining together some forty years ago. The lady hearing ‘Venice Preserved’ named, made the remark that she believed ‘it was one of Shakespeare’s plays, was it not?’ We have ourselves a bill of Drury Lane, not ten years old, in which ‘Othello’ is announced as Bulwer’s tragedy, &c.; but that, of course, was a misprint. On our showing it in the green-room, however, not one of the performers saw the error!

Let us now look at some of the other personages who figured in the bygone period; and first, of kings. Poor old George III. cannot be said at any time to have been ‘every inch a king.’ He was certainly not, by nature, a cruel man. Yet he betrayed something akin to cruelty when, on the night of the Lord George Gordon riots, an officer who had been actively employed in suppressing the rioters waited on the king to make his report. George III. hurried forward to meet him, crying out with screaming iteration, ‘Well! well! well! I hope you peppered them well! peppered them well! peppered them well!’ There may, however, have been nothing more in this than there was in Wellington’s injunction to his officers on the day that London was threatened with a Chartist revolution, ‘Remember, gentlemen, there must be no little war.’ In such cases humanity to revolutionists is lack of mercy to the friends of order.

It is well known that George III. had an insuperable aversion to Dr. John Willis, who had attended him when the King was labouring under his early intermitting attacks of insanity. Willis was induced to take temporary charge of the King, on Pitt’s promise to make him a baronet and give him a pension of 1,500l. a year—pleasant things which never came to pass. Queen Charlotte hated Willis even more than the King did. The physician earned that guerdon by putting George III. in a strait waistcoat whenever he thought the royal violence required it. The doctor took this step on his own responsibility. The Queen never forgave him, and the King, as long as he had memory, never forgot it. In 1811, when the fatal relapse occurred, brought on, Willis thought, by Pitt’s persistent pressure of the Roman Catholic claims on the King’s mind, the Chancellor and the Prince of Wales had some difficulty in inducing the doctor to take charge of the sovereign. When Willis entered that part of Windsor Castle which was inhabited by the King he heard the monarch humming a favourite song in his room. A moment after George III. crossed the threshold on to the landing-place. He was in Windsor uniform as to his coat, blue, with scarlet cuffs and collar, a star on the breast. A waistcoat of buff chamois leather, buskin breeches and top-boots, with the familiar three-cornered hat, completed the costume. He came forth as a bridegroom from his chamber, full of hope and joy, like Cymon, ‘whistling as he went for want of thought,’ and switching his boot with his whip as he went. Suddenly, as his eye fell on Willis, he reeled back as if he had been shot. He shrieked out the hated name, called on God, and fell to the ground. It was long before the unhappy sovereign could be calmed. In his own room the King wept like a child. Every now and then he broke into heartrending exclamations of ‘What can I do without doing wrong? They forget my coronation oath; but I don’t! Oh, my oath! my oath! my oath!’ The King’s excitement on seeing Willis was partly caused by his remembering the Queen’s promise that Willis should never be called in again in case of the King’s illness. Willis on that occasion consented to stay with the King after a fearful scene had taken place with the Queen, her doctors, and council. When Mr. Julian Young knew Willis, from whom he had the above details, the doctor was above eighty years of age, upright and active. He was still a mighty hunter; and, unless Mr. Young was misinformed, on the very day before his death he shot two or three brace of snipes in the morning, and danced at the Lincoln ball at night. Willis did not reach his hundredth year, as Dr. Routh, of Magdalen College, Oxford, did. Just before the death of the latter, Lord Campbell visited and had a long conversation with him. At parting the centenarian remarked: ‘I hope it will not be many years before we meet again.’ ‘Did he think,’ said Lord Campbell afterwards, ‘that he and I were going to live for ever?’

Monarchs, who have to submit to many tyrannies by which monarchs alone can suffer, must have an especial dread of levees and presentations. The monotony must be killing; at the very best, irritating. George IV. had the stately dreariness very much relieved. On one occasion, when a nervous gentleman was bowing and passing before him, a lord-in-waiting kindly whispered to him, ‘Kiss hands!’ The nervous gentleman accordingly moved on to the door, turned round, and there kissed his hands airily to the King by way of kindly farewell! George IV. laughed almost as heartily as his brother, King William, did at an unlucky alderman who was at Court on the only day Mr. Julian Young ever felt himself constrained to go into the royal presence. The alderman’s dress-sword got between his legs as he was backing from that presence, whereby he was tripped up and fell backwards on the floor. King William cared not a fig for dignity. He remarked with great glee to those who stood near: ‘By Jove! the fellow has cut a crab!’ and the kingly laughter was, as it were, poured point blank into the floundering alderman. This was not encouraging to Mr. Young, who had to follow. As newly-appointed royal chaplain in Hampton Court Palace Chapel, King William had expressed a wish to see him at a levee, and obedience was a duty. The chaplain had been told by Sir Horace Seymour that he had nothing to do but follow the example of the gentleman who might happen to be before him. The principal directions to the neophyte were: ‘Bow very low, and do not turn your back on the King!’ The instant the chaplain had kissed the King’s hand, however, he turned his back upon his sovereign, and hurried off. Sir Horace Seymour afterwards consoled him for this breach of etiquette by stating that a Surrey baronet who had followed him made a wider breach in court observance. The unlucky baronet, seeing the royal hand outstretched, instead of reverently putting his lips to it, caught hold of it and wrung it heartily! The King, who loved a joke, probably enjoyed levees, the usual monotony of which was relieved by such screaming-farce incidents as these.

Those royal brothers, sons of George III., were remarkably outspoken. They were not witty themselves, but they were now and then the cause of wit in others. It must have been the Duke of Cumberland who (on listening to Mr. Nightingale’s story of having been run away with when driving, and that at a critical moment he jumped out of the carriage) blandly exclaimed: ‘Fool! fool!’ ‘Now,’ said Nightingale, on telling the incident to Horace Smith, ‘it’s all very well for him to call me a fool; but I can’t conceive why he should. Can you?’ ‘No,’ rejoined Horace, ‘I can’t, because he could not suppose you ignorant of the fact!’

Among the most unhappy lords of themselves who lived in a past generation, there was not one who might have been so happy, had he pleased, as the author of ‘Vathek.’ It is very well said of Beckford that there has seldom existed a man who, inheriting so much, did so little for his fellow-creatures. There was a grim humour in some of his actions. In illustration of this we may state that when Beckford was living in gorgeous seclusion at Fonthill, two gentlemen, who were the more curious to spy into the glories of the place because strangers were forbidden, climbed the park walls at dusk, and on alighting within the prohibited enclosure, found themselves in presence of the lord of the place. Beckford awed them by his proud condescension. He politely dragged them through all the splendours of his palace, and then, with cruel courtesy, made them dine with him. When the night was advanced, he took his involuntary guests into the park, bidding them adieu with the remark, that as they had found their way in they might find their way out. It was as bad as bandaging a man’s eyes on Salisbury Plain, and bidding him find his way to Bath. At sunrise the weary guests, who had pursued a fruitless voyage of discovery all night, were guided to a point of egress, and they never thought of calling on their host again.

Ready wit in women (now passed away); wit, too, combined with courage, is by no means rare. During the ruro-diabolical reign of ‘Swing,’ that incarnation of ruffianism, in the person of the most hideous blackguard in the district, with a mob of thieves and murderers at his back, attacked Fifield, the old family residence of two elderly maiden ladies, named Penruddock. When the mob were on the point of resorting to extreme violence, Miss Betty Penruddock expressed her astonishment to the ugly leader of the band that ‘such a good-looking man as he should be captain of such an ill-favoured band of robbers. Never again will I trust to good looks!’ cried the old lady, whose flattery so touched the vanity of ‘Swing’ that he prevailed on his followers to desist. ‘Only give us some beer,’ he said, ‘and we won’t touch a hair of your head!’ ‘You can’t,’ retorted the plucky old lady, ‘for I wear a wig!’ On the other hand, the vanity of young ladies was once effectually checked at Hampton Court Chapel. A youthful beauty once fainted, and the handsome Sir Horace Seymour carried her out. On successive Sundays successive youthful beauties fainted, and the handsome Sir Horace carried them successively out, till he grew tired of bearing such sweet burdens. A report that in future all swooning nymphs would be carried out of the chapel by the dustman cured the epidemic.

We are much disposed to think that there is at least as much ready wit and terseness of expression among the humbler classes as among those who are higher born and better taught. Much has been said of the ladies of Llangollen, Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Ponsonby. We question if in all that has been written of those pseudo-recluses, they have been half so well hit-off as by Mrs. Morris, a lodging-house keeper in the neighbourhood. ‘I must say, sir, after all,’ observed Mrs. Morris, ‘that they were very charitable and cantankerous. They did a deal of good, and never forgave an injury!’ There is something of the ring of Mrs. Poyser in this pithily-rendered judgment. Quite as sharp a passage turns up in the person of an eccentric toll-keeper, Old Jeffreys, who was nearly destitute of mental training, and whom Mr. Julian Young was anxious to draw to church service. The old man was ready for him. ‘Yes, sir, it be a pity, bain’t it? We pike-keepers, and shepherds, and carters, and monthly nusses has got souls as well as them that goes to church and chapel. But what can us do? “Why,” I says, says I, to the last parson as preached to me, “don’t catechism say summat or other about doing our duty in that state of life in which we be?” So, after all, when I be taking toll o’ Sundays, I’m not far wrong, am I?’ The rector proposed to find a paid substitute for him while he attended church. Jeffreys was ready with his reply. ‘That ’ud never do, sir,’ he said. ‘What! leave my post to a stranger? What would master say to me if he heard on’t.’ Mr. Julian Young, pointing with pleasure to a Bible on old Jeffreys’ shelf, expressed a hope that he often read it. ‘Can’t say as how I do, sir,’ was the candid rejoinder; ‘I allus gets so poorus over it!’ When the rector alluded to a certain wench as ‘disreputable,’ Jeffreys protested in the very spirit of chivalry. ‘Don’t do that! Do as I do! I allus praises her. Charity hides a deal o’ sin, master! ain’t that Scripture? If it are, am I to be lectured at for sticking up and saying a good word for she? ‘When it was urged that this light-o’-love queen ought to be married, Samaritan Jeffreys stept in with his sympathetic balsam. ‘Poor thing!’ he exclaimed, ‘she ain’t no turn to it!’ The apology was worthy of my Uncle Toby!

There are other stories quite worthy of him who invented Uncle Toby; but, basta! we have been, as it were, metaphorically dining with Mr. Julian Young—dining so well that we cannot recall to mind half the anecdotes told at his table in illustration of Charles Young and his times.

WILLIAM CHARLES MACREADY.

In the year 1793, a gentleman who was a member of the Covent Garden company, in the department of ‘utilities,’ might be seen, any day during the season, punctually on his way to the theatre, for rehearsal or for public performance. At the above date he had been seven years on the London boards, having first appeared at the ‘Garden’ in 1786, as Flutter in ‘The Belle’s Stratagem.’ His name was William Macready, father of the Macready, and his début on the English stage was owing to the influence of Macklin, whom the young fellow had gratified by playing Egerton to the veteran’s Sir Pertinax, exactly according to the elaborate instructions he had patiently received from Macklin himself at rehearsal.

William Macready had left the vocation of his father in Dublin—that of an upholsterer—for the uncertain glories of the stage. The father was a common councilman, and was respectably connected—or, rather, his richer relatives were respectably connected in having him for a kinsman. In Ireland there is a beggarly pride which looks down upon trade as a mean thing. Mr. Macready, the flourishing Dublin upholsterer, took to that sound mean thing, and found his account in so doing. His prouder kinsmen may have better respected their blood, but they had not half so good a book at their banker’s.

The upholsterer’s son took his kinsmen’s view of trade, and deserted it accordingly. He could hardly, however, have gratified them by turning player; but he followed the bent of his inclinations, addressed himself to sock and buskin, toiled in country theatres, was tolerated rather than patronised in his native city, and, as before said, got a footing on the Covent Garden stage in 1786.

William Macready’s position there in 1793 was much the same that it was when he first appeared. Perhaps he had a little improved it, by the popular farce of which he was the author, ‘The Irishman in London,’ which was first acted at Covent Garden in 1792. In 1793 he was held good enough to act Cassio to Middleton’s Othello, and was held cheap enough to be cast for Fag in the ‘Rivals.’ On his benefit night—he was in a position to share the house with Hull—the two partners played such walking gentlemen’s characters as Cranmer and Surrey (the latter by Macready) to the Wolsey and Queen Catharine of Mr. and Mrs. Pope; but Macready, in the afterpiece, soared to vivacious comedy, and acted Figaro to the Almaviva of mercurial Lewis. If he ever played an Irish part, it was only when Jack Johnstone was indisposed—which was not his custom of an afternoon.

The best of these actors, and others better than the best named above, received but very moderate salaries. Mr. Macready’s was probably not more than three or four pounds per week. Upon certainly some such salary the worthy actor maintained a quiet home in Mary Street, Tottenham Court (or Hampstead) Road. At the head of the little family that gathered round the table in Mary Street was one of the best of mothers; and chief among the children—the one at least who became the most famous—was William Charles Macready, whom so many still remember as a foremost actor, and in whom some even recognised a great master of his art.

Among the earliest remembrances of this eminent player, he has noticed in his most interesting ‘Reminiscences,’ that ‘the res angustæ domi called into active duty all the economical resources and active management of a mother’ (whose memory, he says, is enshrined in his heart’s fondest gratitude) ‘to supply the various wants’ of himself and an elder sister, who only lived long enough to make him ‘sensible of her angelic nature.’ Macready was the fifth child of this family, but his sister, Olivia, was the only one (then born) who lived long enough for him to remember. She was older than he by a year and a half, and she survived only till he was just in his sixth year; ‘but she lives,’ he says, ‘like a dim and far-off dream, to my memory, of a spirit of meekness, love, and truth, interposing itself between my infant will and the evil it purposed. It is like a vision of an angelic influence upon a most violent and self-willed disposition.’

It may be added here that Macready had a younger brother, Edward, who distinguished himself as a gallant officer in the army, and two younger sisters, Letitia and Ellen, to whom he was an affectionate brother and friend. Meanwhile Macready passed creditably through a school at Birmingham, and thence to Rugby. At the latter place, where one of his kinsmen was a master, the student laid the ground of all the classical knowledge he possessed, took part in private plays, and was hurt at the thought that he had any inclination to be a professional actor. At Rugby, too, he showed, but with some reason, the fiery quality of his temper. He was unjustly sent up for punishment, and was flogged accordingly. ‘Returning,’ he says, ‘to my form, smarting with choking rage and indignation, where I had to encounter the compassion of some and the envious jeers of others, my passion broke out in the exclamation, “D——n old Birch! I wish he was in Hell!’”

Macready’s excellent mother, of whom he never speaks without dropping, as it were, a flower to honour her memory, died before he reached home from Rugby, so that the world was, for a time, without sun to him, for the sire was not a very amiable person. The younger Macready resorted to the best possible cure for sorrow, steady and active work, and plenty of both. At last, with no very cheerful encouragement from his father and with doubt and fear on his own part, he, in June 1811, made his début, in Birmingham, in ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ ‘the part of Romeo by a Young Gentleman, being his first appearance on any stage.’ He, who was afterwards so very cool and self-possessed, nearly marred all by what is called ‘stage-fright.’ A mist fell on his eyes; the very applause, as he came forward, bewildered him; and he describes himself as being for some time like an automaton, moving in certain defined limits. ‘I went mechanically,’ he says, ‘through the variations in which I had drilled myself;’ but he gradually gained courage and power over himself. The audience stimulated the first and rewarded the second by their applause. ‘Thenceforward,’ says Macready, ‘I trod on air, became another being or a happier self, and when the curtain fell and the intimate friends and performers crowded on the stage to raise up the Juliet and myself, shaking my hands with fervent congratulations, a lady asked me, ‘Well, sir, how do you feel now?’ my boyish answer was without disguise, ‘I feel as if I should like to act it all over again!’

Between this and his first appearance in London Macready acted in most of the theatres of every degree in the three kingdoms. Often this practice was rendered the more valuable by his having to perform with the most perfect actors and actresses who were starring in the country. But, whether with them or without, whether with audiences or with a mere two or three, he did his best. Like Barton Booth, he would play to a man in the pit. ‘It was always my rule,’ he says, ‘to make the best out of a bad house, and before the most meagre audiences ever assembled it has been my invariable practice to strive my best, using the opportunity as a lesson; and I am conscious of having derived great benefit from the rule. I used to call it acting to myself.’ Macready had another rule which is worth mentioning. Some of the old French tragedy queens used to keep themselves all day in the temper of the characters they were to represent in the evening. So that, at home or on the boards, they swept to and fro in towering rage. So, Macready was convinced of the necessity of keeping, on the day of exhibition, the mind as intent as possible on the subject of the actor’s portraiture, even to the very moment of his entrance on the scene. With the observance of this rule, Macready must have made 64 Frith Street, Soho, re-echo with joyous feelings and ebullitions of fury, to suit the temper of the night, when in 1816 he made his bow to a London audience as Orestes in the ‘Distressed Mother,’ and when the curtain rose grasped Abbot almost convulsively by the hand, and dashed upon the stage, exclaiming as in a transport of the highest joy, ‘Oh, Pylades! what’s life without a friend?’ The Orestes was a success; but it was never a favourite character with the public, as Talma’s was with the French. The career thus begun (at ten, fifteen, and at last eighteen pounds per week for five years) came to a close in 1851. Five-and-thirty years out of the fifty-eight Macready had then reached. We need not trace this progressive career, beginning with Ambrose Phillips and ending with Shakespeare (‘Macbeth’). During that career he created that one great character in which no player could come near him, namely, Virginius, in 1820. Macready, however, was not the original representative of Virginius. That character in Knowles’s most successful play was first acted by John Cooper in Glasgow; but Macready really created the part in London. Further, Macready did his best to raise the drama, actors, and audiences to a dignity never before known, and gained nothing but honour by his two ventures at management. He was the first to put a play upon the stage with an almost lavish perfection. In this way he was never equalled. Mr. Charles Kean imitated him in this artist-like proceeding; but that highly respectable actor and man was as far behind Macready in magnificence of stage management as he was distant from his own father in genius.

If Macready, on his début as a boy, was scared, he was deeply moved when, within a stone’s throw of sixty, he was to act for the last time, and then go home for ever. This was upwards of thirty years ago, so rapidly does time fly—the 28th of February, 1851. His emotion was not in the acting, but in the taking leave of it, and of those who came to see it for the last time. He says himself of his Macbeth that he never played it better than on that night. There was a reality, with a vigour, truth, and dignity, which he thought he had never before thrown into that favourite character. ‘I rose with the play, and the last scene was a real climax.’ On his first entrance, indeed, at the beginning of his part, ‘the thought occurred to me of the presence of my children, and that for a minute overcame me; but I soon recovered myself into self-possession.’ Still more deeply moved at the ‘farewell’ to a house bursting into a wild enthusiasm of applause, he ‘faltered for a moment at the fervent, unbounded expression of attachment from all before me; but preserved my self-possession.’ Those of his ten children who had survived and were present on that occasion had ample reason to be proud of their father. For many years he would not sanction their being present at his public exhibitions. This was really to doubt the dignity and usefulness of his art, to feel a false shame, and to authorise in others that contempt for the ‘playactor’ which, entertaining it, as he did thoroughly, for many of his fellows, he neither felt for himself nor for those whom he could recognise as being great and worthy masters in that art. When his children were allowed the new delight of witnessing how nobly he could interpret the noblest of the poets, the homage of their reverential admiration must have been added to that of their unreserved affection. That he was not popular at any time with inferior or subordinate players is undoubtedly true. Such persons thought that only want of luck and opportunity placed them lower in the scale than Macready. It would be as reasonable for the house-painters to account in the same way for their not being Vandycks and Raffaelles.

Sensitive to criticism he was, and yet scarcely believed himself to be so. He belabours critics pretty roughly; but we observe that theatrical critics dined with him occasionally, and we mark that he praises the good sense and discrimination of one of these critics—whose criticism was very much in the actor’s favour. Vanity he also had, certainly. We should have come to this conclusion, had we nothing more to justify the assertion than what we find in his own record. We see his vanity in the superabundant excess of his modesty; but we think none the worse of him for it. An artist who is not somewhat vain of his powers has, probably, no ground for a little wholesome pride. It was in Macready tempered with that sort of fear that a vain man may feel, lest in the exercise of his art he should fall in the slightest degree short of his self-estimation, or of that in which he believed himself to be held by the public. He never, on entering a town, saw his name on a bill, without feeling a flutter of the heart, made up of this mingled fear and pride. So, Mrs. Siddons never went on the stage at any time without something of the same sensation. We should think little of any actor or actress who should avow that they ever ‘went on,’ in a great part, without some hesitation lest the attempt might fall short of what it was their determination to achieve, and what they felt themselves qualified to accomplish. Vanity and timidity? All true artists are conscious of both—ought to possess both; just as they ought to possess not only impulse but judgment; not only head, but heart; heart to flash the impulses, head to control them.

Macready carried to the stage his genuine piety. It is, perhaps, a little too much aired in his ‘Diary,’ but it is not the less to be believed in. He went by a good old-fashioned rule, to do his duty in that state of life to which it had pleased God to call him—as the Catechism teaches, or used to teach, all of us. In his pious fervour, in his prayers that what he is going to act may be for good, that what in the management he has undertaken may be to the increase of the general happiness rather than to that of his banking account; in these and a score of other instances we are reminded of those French and Italian saints of the stage who, as they stood at the wing, crossed themselves at the sound of sacred names in the play; or, who counted their beads in the green-room; kept their fasts; mortified themselves, and never missed a mass. Nay, the religious feeling was as spontaneous in Macready as it was in the Italian actors whom he himself saw, and who, at the sound of the ‘Angelus’ in the street, stopped the action of the play, fell on their knees, gently tapped their breasts, and were imitated in these actions by the sympathising majority of the audience.

We fully endorse the judgment of a critic who has said that with the worst of tempers Macready had the best of hearts. Some of the tenderest of his actions are not registered in the volumes of his life, but they are recorded in grateful bosoms. There were married actresses in his company, when he managed the ‘Garden,’ and afterwards the ‘Lane,’ whom he would rate harshly enough for inattention; but there were certain times when he was prompted to tell them that their proper place, for a while, was home; and that till they recovered health and strength their salary would be continued, and then run on as usual. The sternest moralist will forgive him for knocking down Mr. Bunn, when he remembers this tender part in the heart of Macready.

Towards women that heart may be said to have been sympathetically inclined. His early life led him into many temptations; he had, as he confesses, many loves in his time, real and imaginary; but the first true and ever-abiding one was that which ended in his marriage with a young actress, Miss Atkins. The whole story is touchingly told. We feel the joys and the sorrows of the April time of that love. We share in the triumph of the lovers; and throughout the record of their union Macready inspires us with as much respectful affection for that true wife as in other pages he stirs us to honour the memory of his mother. He was singularly happy in the women whom it was his good fortune to know. Early in life, after his mother’s death, he found wise friends in some of them, whose wisdom ‘kept him straight,’ as the phrase goes, when crooked but charming ways opened before him. At his latest in life, the inestimable good of woman’s best companionship was vouchsafed to him; and further than this it would be impertinent to speak.

The dignity of the departed actor was his attribute, which in his busy days atoned for such faults as cannot be erased from his record. How he supported the dignity of the drama, and, we may say, of its patrons, may be seen in the registry of the noble dramas he produced, and in his purification of the audience side of the house. No person born since his time can have any idea of the horrible uncleanness that presented itself in the two patent theatres in the days before Macready’s management commenced. When he found that he was bound by the terms of his lease to provide accommodation and refreshment for women who had no charm of womanhood left in them, Macready assigned a dingy garret and a rush-light or two for that purpose, and the daughters of joy fled from it, never to return.

It is a strange and repulsive thing to look back at the sarcasm flung at him by the vile part of the press at that time, for his enabling honest-minded women to visit a theatre without feeling ashamed at their being there, in company with those who had no honest-mindedness. In this, as in many other circumstances, he was worth all the Lord Chamberlains—silly, intruding, inconsistent, unreasonable beings—that have ever existed.

The career of the actor—we may say, of the actor and of the private gentleman—was a long one. Among the great dramatic personages whom Macready saw in the course of that career, were ‘a glimpse of King dressed as Lord Ogilvy,’ his original character, ‘and distinguished for its performance in Garrick’s day;’ Lewis, whose face he never forgot, but he never saw that restless, ever-smiling actor on the stage. Macready was struck with the beauty and deportment of Mrs. Siddons, long before he acted with her; and he was enthralled by Mrs. Billington, though he could in after years only recall the figure of a very lusty woman, and the excitement of the audience when the orchestra struck up the symphony of Arne’s rattling bravura, ‘The Soldier Tired,’ in the opera of ‘Artaxerxes.’ One of the most remarkable of these illustrious persons was seen by him at the Birmingham Theatre, 1808. The afterpiece was ‘Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogene,’ a ballet pantomime. The lady fair was acted by the manager’s wife, Mrs. Watson—ungainly, tawdry, and as fat as a porpoise, an enormous hill of flesh. Alonzo the Brave was represented by ‘a little mean-looking man in a shabby green satin dress ... the only impression I carried away was that the hero and heroine were the worst in the piece’ (a ballet of action, without words). Macready adds that he neither knew nor guessed that ‘under that shabby green satin dress was hidden one of the most extraordinary theatrical geniuses that have ever illustrated the dramatic poetry of England!’ In half a dozen years more, what was Macready’s astonishment to find this little, insignificant Alonzo the Brave had burst out into the grandly impassioned personator of Othello, Richard, and Shylock—Edmund Kean!

Macready’s testimony to Kean’s marvellous powers is nearly always highly favourable. Macready saw the great master act Richard III. at Drury Lane in his first season, 1814. ‘When,’ he tells us, ‘a little keenly-visaged man rapidly bustled across the stage, I felt there was meaning in the alertness of his manner and the quickness of his step.’ The progress of the play increased the admiration of the young actor in his box, who was studying the other young actor on the stage. He found mind of no common order in Edmund Kean. ‘In his angry complaining of Nature’s injustice to his bodily imperfections, as he uttered the line, “To shrink my arm up like a withered shrub,” Kean remained looking on the limb for some moments with a sort of bitter discontent, and then struck it back in angry disgust.’ To his father’s whisper, ‘It’s very poor,’ the son replied readily, ‘Oh, no! it is no common thing.’ Macready praises the scene with Lady Anne, and that in which Richard tempts Buckingham to the murder of the young princes. In the latter, he found Kean’s interpretation ‘consistent with his conception, proposing their death as a political necessity, and sharply requiring it as a business to be done.’ Cooke interpreted the scene in another way. In Cooke’s Richard, ‘the source of the crime was apparent in the gloomy hesitation with which he gave reluctant utterance to the deed of blood.’ If Cooke was more effective than Kean on one or two solitary points, Kean was superior in the general portraiture. As Macready remarks, Kean ‘hurried you along in his resolute course with a spirit that brooked no delay. In inflexibility of will and sudden grasp of expedients he suggested the idea of a feudal Napoleon.’

With respect to the characters enacted by the greatest actor of the present century, Macready’s testimony of Kean is that in none of Kean’s personations did he display more masterly elocution than in the third act of ‘Richard III.’ In Sir Edward Mortimer, Kean was unapproachable, and Master Betty (whom Macready praises highly) next to him, though far off. In Sir Edward, Kean ‘subjected his style to the restraint of the severest taste. Throughout the play the actor held absolute sway over his hearers; and there is no survivor of those hearers who will not enjoy a description which enables them to live over again moments of a bygone delight which the present stage cannot afford. There are, perhaps, not so few who remember Kean’s Sir Edward Mortimer as of those who remember his ‘Oroonoko.’ Those who do will endorse all that Macready says of that masterly representation of the African Prince in slavery, where Kean, with a calm submission to his fate, still preserved all his princely demeanour. There was one passage which was ‘never to be forgotten’—the prayer for his Imoinda. After replying to Blandford, ‘No, there is nothing to be done for me,’ he remained, says Macready, ‘for a few moments in apparent abstraction; then, with a concentration of feeling that gave emphasis to every word, clasping his hands together, in tones most tender, distinct, and melodious, he poured out, as if from the very depths of his heart, his earnest supplication:—

Thou God ador’d, thou ever-glorious Sun!

If she be yet on earth, send me a beam

Of thy all-seeing power to light me to her!

Or if thy sister-goddess has preferr’d

Her beauty to the skies, to be a star,

Oh, tell me where she shines, that I may stand

Whole nights, and gaze upon her!’

We may refer to another passage, in ‘Othello,’ in which the tenderness, distinctness, and mournful melodiousness of Edmund Kean’s voice used to affect the whole house to hushed and rapt admiration; namely, the passage beginning with, ‘Farewell, the plumed troop!’ and ending with, ‘Othello’s occupation’s gone!’ It was like some magic instrument, which laid all hearts submissive to its irresistible enchantment.

While Macready allows that flashes of genius were rarely wanting in Kean’s least successful performances, he does not forget to note that when he played Iago to Kean’s Othello, he observed that the latter was playing not at all like to his old self. It is to be remembered that this was in 1832, when Kean was on the brink of the grave, broken in constitution, and with no power to answer to his will. But Macready justly recognised the power when it existed, and set the world mad with a new delight. Others were not so just, nor so generous. ‘Many of the Kemble school,’ he says, ‘resisted conviction of Kean’s merits, but the fact that he made me feel was an argument to enrol me with the majority on the indisputable genius he displayed.’ Some of the Kemble family were as reluctant to be convinced as many of the Kemble school were, but we must except the lady whom we all prefer to call ‘Fanny Kemble.’ She, in her ‘Journal,’ speaks without bias, not always accurately, but still justly and generously. To her, the great master was apparent, and she truly says that when Kean died there died with him Richard, Shylock, and Othello.

Before quitting Kean for the Kembles, we must permit ourselves to extract the account given by Macready of a supper after Richard III. had been played:—

We retired to the hotel as soon as the curtain fell, and were soon joined by Kean, accompanied, or rather attended, by Pope. I need not say with what intense scrutiny I regarded him as we shook hands on our mutual introduction. The mild and modest expression of his Italian features, and his unassuming manner, which I might perhaps justly describe as partaking in some degree of shyness, took me by surprise, and I remarked with special interest the indifference with which he endured the fulsome flatteries of Pope. He was very sparing of words during, and for some time after, supper; but about one o’clock, when the glass had circulated pretty freely, he became animated, fluent, and communicative. His anecdotes were related with a lively sense of the ridiculous; in the melodies he sang there was a touching grace, and his powers of mimicry were most humorously or happily exerted in an admirable imitation of Braham; and in a story of Incledon acting Steady the Quaker at Rochester without any rehearsal, where, in singing the favourite air, ‘When the lads of the village so merrily, oh!’ he heard himself to his dismay and consternation accompanied by a single bassoon; the music of his voice, his perplexity at each recurring sound of the bassoon, his undertone maledictions on the self-satisfied musician, the peculiarity of his habits, all were hit off with a humour and an exactness that equalled the best display Mathews ever made, and almost convulsed us with laughter. It was a memorable evening, the first and last I ever spent in private with this extraordinary man.

Macready’s estimation of Kemble and the Kemble school is not at all highly pitched, save in the case of Mrs. Siddons; but he notes how she outlived her powers, and returned a few times to the stage when her figure had enlarged and her genius had diminished. When John Kemble took leave of the Dublin stage, in 1816, Macready was present; he records that ‘the house was about half full.’ Kemble acted Othello (which, at that time, Kean had made his own). ‘A more august presence could hardly be imagined.’ He was received with hearty applause, ‘but the slight bow with which he acknowledged the compliment spoke rather dissatisfaction at the occasional vacant spaces before him than recognition of the respectful feeling manifested by those present. I must suppose he was out of humour, for, to my exceeding regret, he literally walked through the part.’ The London audiences, as Kemble’s career was drawing to a close, were not more sympathetic. At Kemble’s Cato, ‘The house was moderately filled; there was sitting room in the pit, and the dress circle was not at all crowded.’ To the dignity of the representation Macready renders homage of admiration; but he says that Cato was not in strict Roman attire, and that with only one effort, the ‘I am satisfied,’ when he heard that Marcius ‘greatly fell,’ Kemble’s husky voice and laboured articulation could not enliven the monotony of a tragedy which was felt to be a tax on the patience of the audience. The want of variety and relief rendered it uninteresting, and those at least who were not classical antiquaries found the whole thing uncommonly tedious.

It is unquestionably among the unaccountable things connected with ‘the stage’ that Kemble’s farewell performances in London, 1817, were as a whole unproductive. Those closing nights, not answering the manager’s expectations of their attraction, were given for benefits to those performers who chose to pay the extra price. Macready was not present on the closing night of all, when Kemble nobly played his peerless Coriolanus; but he witnessed several other representations, and he dwells especially on the last performance of ‘Macbeth,’ when Mrs. Siddons acted the Lady to her brother’s Macbeth. Macready was disappointed with both. Mrs. Siddons was no longer the enchantress of old: ‘years had done their work, and those who had seen in her impersonations the highest glories of her art, now felt regret that she had been prevailed on to leave her honoured retirement, and force a comparison between the grandeur of the past and the feeble present. It was not a performance, but a mere repetition of the poet’s text; no flash, no sign of her pristine, all-subduing genius.’ Kemble, as Macbeth, was ‘correct, tame, and ineffective,’ through the first four acts of the play, which moved heavily on; but he was roused to action in the fifth act. With action there was pathos; and ‘all at once, he seemed carried away by the genius of the scene.’ Macready brings the scene itself before his readers, ending with the words: ‘His shrinking from Macduff, when the charm on which his life hung was broken, by the declaration that his antagonist “was not of woman born,” was a masterly stroke of art. His subsequent defiance was most heroic; and, at his death, Charles Kemble received him in his arms and laid him gently on the ground, his physical powers being unequal to further effort.’

Of persons non-dramatic, many pass before the mind’s eye of the reader. Lord Nelson visited the Birmingham Theatre, and Macready noted his pale and interesting face, and listened so eagerly to all he uttered that for months after he used to be called upon to repeat ‘what Lord Nelson said to your father,’ which was to the effect that the esteem in which the elder Macready was held by the town made it ‘a pleasure and a duty’ for Lord Nelson to visit the theatre. With the placid and mournful-looking Admiral was Lady Hamilton, who laughed loud and long, clapped her uplifted hands with all her heart, and kicked her heels against the foot-board of her seat, as some verses were sung in honour of her and England’s hero.

There was a time when Macklin ceased to belong to the drama, when he was out of the world, in his old age, and his old Covent Garden house. One of the most characteristic of incidents is one told of Macklin in his dotage, when prejudice had survived all sense. Macready’s father called on the aged actor with lack-lustre eye, who was seated in an arm-chair, unconscious of anyone being present. Mrs. Macklin drew his attention to the visitor: ‘My dear, here is Mr. Macready come to see you.’ ‘Who?’ ‘Mr. Macready, my dear.’ ‘Ah! who is he?’ ‘Mr. Macready, you know, who went to Dublin, to play for your benefit.’ ‘Ha! my benefit! what was it? what did he act?’ ‘I acted Egerton, sir,’ replied Mr. Macready, ‘in your own play.’ ‘Ha! my play! what was it?’ ‘The “Man of the World,” sir.’ ‘Ha! “Man of the World!” devilish good title! who wrote it?’ ‘You did, sir.’ ‘Did I? well, what was it about?’ ‘Why, sir, there was a Scotchman’—‘Ah! damn them!’ Macklin’s hatred of the Scotch was vigorous after all other feeling was dead within him.

Equally good as a bit of character-painting is the full length of Mrs. Piozzi, whom William Charles Macready met at Bath, in the house of Dr. Gibbs. She struck the actor as something like one of Reynolds’s portraits walking out of its frame: ‘a little old lady dressed point devise in black satin, with dark glossy ringlets under her neat black hat, highly rouged, not the end of a ribbon or lace out of its place,’ and entering the room with unfaltering step. She was the idol of the hour, and Macready, specially introduced to her, was charmed with her vivacity and good humour. The little old lady read, by request, some passages from Milton, a task she delighted in, and for doing which effectively she considered herself well qualified. She chose the description of the lazar-house, from the 11th Book of ‘Paradise Lost,’ and dwelt with emphatic distinctness on the various ills to which mortality is exposed. ‘The finger on the dial-plate of the pendule was just approaching the hour of ten, when, with a Cinderella-like abruptness, she rose and took her leave, evidently as much gratified by contributing to our entertainment as we were by the opportunity of making her acquaintance.’ According to Dr. Gibbs, the vivacious old Cinderella never stayed after ten was about to strike. Circumstances might indeed prompt the sensitive lady to depart earlier. Mr. Macready subsequently met the lively little lioness at the Twisses. The company was mixed, old and young; the conversation was general, or people talked the young with the young, the old among themselves. Mrs. Piozzi was not the oracle on whose out-speakings all hearers reverentially waited. Consequently, ‘long before her accustomed hour,’ Mrs. Piozzi started up, and coldly wishing Mr. and Mrs. Twiss ‘good night,’ she left the room. To the general inquiries, by look or word, the hostess simply remarked, ‘She is very much displeased.’ The really gifted old lady’s vanity was wounded; lack of homage sent her home in a huff. Some of the best sketches in the book are of scenes of Macready’s holiday travel. On one occasion, in a corner of an Italian garden, near a church, he caught a priest kissing a young girl whom he had just confessed. Nothing could be merrier or better-humoured than Macready’s description of this pretty incident. The young Father, or brother, was quite in order; Rome claims absolute rule over faith—and morals.

We close this chronicle of so many varied hues with reluctance. That which belongs to the retired life of the actor is fully as interesting as the detail of the times when he was in harness. Indeed, in the closing letters addressed to the present Lady Pollock, there are circumstances of his early career not previously recorded. The record of the home-life is full of interest, and we sympathise with the old actor, who, as the fire of temperament died out, appeared purified and chastened by the process.

Macready, throughout his long life, had no ‘flexibility of spine’ for men of wealth or title, but he had, if he describes himself truly, perfect reverence for true genius, wheresoever found. He was oppressed with his own comparative littleness and his seeming inability to cope with men better endowed, intellectually, than himself. And yet, we find him, when he must have felt that he was great, was assured he was so by his most intimate admirers, and counted amongst them some of the foremost literary men and critics of the day—we find him, we say, moodily complaining that he was not sought for by ‘society,’ and not invited into it. There was no real ground for the complaint. He who made it was an honour to the society of which he was a part. Every page of this record, not least so those inscribed with confession of his faults, will raise him in the esteem of all its readers. He went to his rest in 1873, and he is fortunate in the friend to whom he confided the task of writing his life. The work, edited with modesty and judgment, is a permanent addition to our dramatic literature.

PRIVATE THEATRICALS.

As in Greece a man suffered no disparagement by being an actor there was no disposition to do in private what was not forbidden in public. The whole profession was ennobled when an actor so accomplished as Aristodemus was honoured with the office of ambassador.

In Rome a man was dishonoured by being a player. Accordingly noble Roman youths loved to act in private, excusing themselves on the ground that no professional actor polluted their private stage. Roman youths, however, had imperial example and noble justification when a Roman emperor made his first appearance on the public stage, and succeeded, as a matter of course.

Nero and Louis XIV. were the two sublime monarchs who were most addicted to private theatricals; but the Roman outdid the Frenchman. We know that persons of the Senatorial and Equestrian orders, and of both sexes, played the parts, but we do not know how they liked or disliked what they dared not decline. One can fancy, however, the figure and feelings of the Roman knight when he began to practise riding on an elephant that trotted swiftly along a rope. What strong expletives he must have muttered to himself!—any one of which, uttered audibly, would have cost him his head as a fine levied by his imperial manager. As to Nero’s riding, and racing, and wrestling, and charioteering, as an amateur, among professionals who always took care to be beaten by him, these things were nothing compared with his ardour as a private player, and especially as what would now be called an opera singer. After all, Nero was more like an amateur actor who plays in public occasionally than an actor in strictly private theatricals. There is no doubt of his having been fond of music; he was well instructed in the art and a skilful proficient. His first great enjoyment after becoming emperor was in sitting up night after night playing with or listening to Terpnus the harper. Nero practised the harp as if his livelihood depended on it; and he went through a discipline of diet, medicine, exercise, and rest, for the benefit of his voice and its preservation, such as, it is to be hoped, no vocalist of the present day would submit himself to. Nero’s first appearance on any stage was made at Naples. The débutant was not at all nervous, for, though an earthquake made the house shake while he was singing, he never ceased till he had finished his song. Had any of the audience fled at the earthquake, they probably would have been massacred for attending more to the natural than the imperial phenomenon. But we can fancy that, when some terrified Drusus got home and his Drusilla asked him about the voice of the illustrissimo Signor Nerone, Drusus looked at her and answered, ‘Never heard such a shake in all my life!’

What an affable fellow that otherwise terrible personage was! How gracious he must have seemed as he dined in the theatre and told those who reverently looked on that by-and-by he would sing clearer and deeper! Our respect for this august actor is a little diminished by the fact that he not only invented the claque, but taught his hired applauders how they were to manifest approbation. He divided them into three classes, constituting several hundreds of individuals. The bombi had to hum approval, the more noisy imbrices were to shower applause like heavy rain upon the tiles, and the testas were to culminate the effect by clapping as if their hands were a couple of bricks. And, with reputation thus curiously made at Naples, he reached Rome to find the city mad to hear him. As the army added their sweet voices of urgency, Nero modestly yielded. He enrolled his name on the list of public singers, but so far kept his imperial identity as to have his harp carried for him by the captain of his Prætorian Guard, and to be half surrounded by friends and followers—the not too exemplary Colonel Jacks and Lord Toms of that early time.

Just as Bottom the weaver would have played, not only Pyramus, but Thisbe and the Lion to boot, so Nero had appetite for every part, and made the most of whatever he had. Suetonius says that, when Nero sang the story of Niobe, ‘he held it out till the tenth hour of the day;’ but Suetonius omits to tell us at what hour the imperial actor first opened his mouth. ‘The Emperor did not scruple,’ says a quaint translation of Suetonius’s ‘Lives of the Twelve Cæsars,’ ‘done into English by several hands, A.D. 1692,’ ‘in private Spectacles to Act his Part among the Common Players, and to accept of a present of a Million of Sesterces from one of the Prætors. He also sang several tragedies in disguise, the Visors and Masks of the Heroes and the Gods, as also of the Heroesses and the Goddesses, being so shap’d as to represent his own Countenance or the Ladies for whom he had the most Affection. Among other things he sang “Canace in Travail,” “Orestes killing his Mother,” “Œdipus struck blind,” and “Hercules raging mad.” At what time it is reported that a young Soldier, being placed sentinel at the Door, seeing him drest up and bound, as the Subject of the Play required, ran in to his Assistance as if the thing had been done in good earnest.’ (Here we have the origin of all those soldiers who have stood at the wings of French and English stages, and who have interfered with the action of the play, or even have fainted away in order to flatter some particular player). Nero certainly had his amateur-actor weaknesses. He provided beforehand all the bouquets that were to be spontaneously flung to him, or awarded as prizes in the shape of garlands. French actresses are said to do the same thing, and this pretty weakness is satirised in the duet between Hortense, the actress, and Brillant, the fine gentleman, in the pretty vaudeville of ‘Le Juif’ (by A. Rousseau, Désaugiers, and Mesnard), brought out at the Porte St.-Martin fifty odd years ago. Hortense is about to appear at Orleans, and she says, or sings:

Je suis l’idole dont on raffole.

Après demain mon triomphe est certain!

‘Oui,’ rejoins Brillant,

Oui! de tous les points de la salle,

Je prédis que sur votre front,

Trente couronnes tomberont.

And Hortense replies confidentially:

Elles sont dans ma malle!

This is a custom, therefore, which French actresses derive from no less a person than Nero. This gentleman, moreover, invariably spoke well of every other actor to that actor’s face, but never at any other time. If this custom has survived—which is, of course, hardly possible—he who practises it can justify himself, if he pleases, by this Neronic example.

Although it was death to leave the theatre before the imperial amateur had finished his part, there were some people who could not ‘stand it,’ but who must have handsomely tipped the incorruptible Roman guard to be allowed to vanish from the scene. There were others who insisted on being on the point of death, but it is not to be supposed that they were carried home without being munificently profuse in their recompense. There was no shamming on the part of the indefatigable Roman ladies, who, it is said, sometimes added a unit to the audience and a new member to the roll of Roman citizens, before they could be got away. And, when a man ran from the theatre, dropped from the walls of the town, and took to his heels across country, he must have been even more disgusted with the great amateur than you are, my dear reader, with, let us say, your favourite worst actor on any stage. Exit Nero, histrio et imperator.

Some one has said that the Italians had not the necessary genius for acting. Ristori has wiped out that reproach. Private theatricals may be said to have been much followed by them. Plays were acted before popes just as they used to be (and on Sundays too) before our bishops. It is on record that the holiest of Holy Fathers have held their sides as they laughed at the ‘imitations’ of English archbishops given to the life by English bishops on mission to Rome; and, on the other hand, there is no comedy so rich as that to be seen and heard in private, acted by a clever, joyous Irish priest, imitating the voice, matter, and manner of the street preachers in Italy. Poliziano’s ‘Orfeo,’ which inaugurated Italian tragedy, was first played in private before Lorenzo the Magnificent. Italian monks used to act Plautus and Terence, and the nuns of Venice were once famous for the perfection with which they acted tragedy in private to select audiences.

Altogether, it seems absurd for anyone to have said that the Italians had not the genius for acting. Groto, the poet—‘the blind man of Adria’—played Œdipus, in Palladio’s theatre at Vicenza, in the most impressive style. Salvator Rosa, the grandest of painters, was the most laughable of low comedians; and probably no Italian has played Saul better than Alfieri, who wrote the tragedy which bears that name.

In France, private theatricals may be said to date from the seventeenth century; but there, as in England, were to be found, long before, especial ‘troops’ in the service of princes and nobles. We are pleased to make record of the fact that Richard III., so early as the time when he was the young Duke of Gloucester, was the first English prince who maintained his own private company of actors, of whom he was the appreciating and generous master. No doubt, after listening to them in the hall of his London mansion, he occasionally gave them an ‘outing’ on his manor at Notting Hill. We have more respect for Duke, or King, Richard, as patron of actors, than we have for Louis XIV. turning amateur player himself, and not only ‘spouting’ verses, but acting parts, singing in operas, and even dancing in the ballets of Benserade and the divertissements of Molière. Quite another type of the amateur actor is to be found in Voltaire. On the famous private stage of the Duchess of Maine, Voltaire acted (in ‘Rome sauvée’) Cicero to the Lentulus of the professional actor, Lekain. If we may believe the illustrious actor himself, nothing could be more truthful, more pathetic, more Roman, than the poet, in the character of the great author.

Voltaire prepared at least one comedy for private representation on the Duchess’s stage, or on that of some other of his noble friends. A very curious story is connected with this piece. It bore the title of ‘Le Comte de Boursoufle.’ After being acted by amateurs, in various noble houses, it gave way to other pieces, the manuscript was put by, and the play was forgotten. Eleven years ago, however, the manuscript of the comedy, in Voltaire’s handwriting, was discovered, and ‘Le Comte de Boursoufle’ was produced at the Odéon. M. Jules Janin and all the French theatrical critics were in a flutter of convulsive delight at the recovery of this comedy. Some persons there were who asked if there was any doubt on the matter, or was the piece by any other clever Frenchman. They were laughed to scorn. The comedy was so full of wit and satire that it could only be the work of the wittiest and most satirical of Frenchmen. ‘If it is not Voltaire’s,’ it was asked, ‘whose could it possibly be?’ This question was answered immediately by the critics in this country, who pointed out that ‘Le Comte de Boursoufle,’ which Voltaire had prepared for a company of private actors, was neither more nor less than an exact translation of Sir John Vanbrugh’s ‘Relapse.’

Private theatricals in France became a sort of institution. They not only formed a part, often a very magnificent part, of the noble mansions of princes, dukes, marquesses, et tout ça, but the theatre was the most exquisite and luxurious portion of the residences of the most celebrated and prodigal actresses. Mademoiselle Guimard, to surpass her contemporaries, possessed two; one in her magnificent house in the Chaussée d’Antin, the other in her villa at Pantin. The one in Paris was such a scene of taste, splendour, extravagance, and scandal, that private boxes, so private that nobody could be seen behind the gilded gratings, were invented for the use and enjoyment of very great ladies. These, wishing to be witnesses of what was being acted on and before the stage, without being supposed to be present themselves, were admitted by a private door, and after seeing all they came to see, and much more, perhaps, than they expected, these high and virtuous dames, wrapped their goodly lace mantles about them, glided down the private staircase to their carriages, and thought La Guimard was the most amiable hussey on or off the stage.

Voltaire’s private theatre, at Monrepos, near Lausanne, has been for ever attached to history by the dignified pen of Gibbon. The great historian’s chief gratification, when he lived at Lausanne, was in hearing Voltaire in the Frenchman’s own tragedies on his own stage. The ‘ladies and gentlemen’ of the company were not geniuses, for Gibbon says of them in his ‘Life,’ that ‘some of them were not destitute of talents.’ The theatre is described as ‘decent.’ The costumes were ‘provided at the expense of the actors,’ and we may guess how the stage was stringently managed, when we learn that ‘the author directed the rehearsals with the zeal and attention of paternal love.’ In his own tragedies, Voltaire represented Lusignan, Alvarez, Benassur, Euphemon, &c. ‘His declamation,’ says Gibbon, ‘was fashioned to the pomp and cadence of the old stage; and he expressed the enthusiasm of poetry rather than the feelings of nature.’ This sing-song style, by which diversified dramas, stilted rather than heroic, horribly dull rather than elevated and stirring, had an effect on Gibbon such as we should never have expected in him, or in any Englishman, we may say on any created being with common sense, in any part of the civilised world. His taste for the French theatre became fortified, and he tells us, ‘that taste has perhaps abated my idolatry for the gigantic genius of Shakespeare, which is inculcated in our infancy as the first duty of Englishmen.’ This is wonderful to read, and almost impossible to believe. We may give more credit to the assertion that ‘the wit and philosophy of Voltaire, his table and theatre, refined in a visible degree the manners of Lausanne.’ It is worthy of note that a tragedy of Voltaire’s is now rarely, if ever, acted. We question if one of his most popular pieces, ‘Adélaïde Du Guesclin,’ has ever been played since it was given at the Théâtre Français (spectacle gratis), 1822, on occasion of the baptism of the Duc de Bordeaux, whom we now better know as the Comte de Chambord, and who knows himself only as ‘Henry V., Roi de France et de Navarre.’

One of Voltaire’s favourite stage pupils was an actor named Paulin, who played a tyrant in the Lausanne company. Voltaire had great hopes of him, and he especially hoped to make much of him as Polifonte, in Voltaire’s tragedy ‘Mérope.’ At the rehearsals, Voltaire, as was customary with him, overwhelmed the performers with his corrections. He sat up one night, to re-write portions of the character of the tyrant Polifonte, and at three in the morning he aroused his servant and bade him carry the new manuscript to Paulin. ‘Sir,’ said the man, ‘at such an unseasonable hour as this M. Paulin will be fast asleep, and there will be no getting into his house.’ ‘Go! run!’ exclaimed Voltaire, in tragic tones. ‘Know that tyrants never sleep!’

Some of the French private theatres of the last century were singular in their construction. We know that the theatre of Pompey was so constructed that, by ingenious mechanism, it could form two amphitheatres side by side or could meet in one extensive circus. On a smaller scale, the salon of the celebrated dancer D’Auberval could be instantaneously turned into a private theatre, complete in all its parts. Perhaps the most perfect, as regards the ability of the actors, as well as the splendour of the house, audience and stage, were the two private theatres at Saint-Assise and Bagnolet, of the Duke of Orleans and Madame de Montesson. None but highly-gifted amateurs trod those boards. The Duke himself was admirable in peasants and in characters abounding in sympathies with nature. Madame de Montesson was fond of playing shepherdesses and young ladies under the pleasures, pains, or perplexities of love; but, with much talent, the lady was far too stout for such parts. It might be said of her, as Rachel said of her very fat sister, whom she saw dressed in the costume of a shepherdess; ‘Bergère! tu as l’air d’une bergère qui a mangé ses brebis!’

Out of the multitude of French private theatres there issued but one great actress, by profession, the celebrated Adrienne Lecouvreur; and she belonged, not to the gorgeous temple of Thespis in the palaces of nobles, but to a modest stage behind the shop of her father, the hatter; and latterly, to one of more artistic pretensions in the courtyard attached to the mansion of a great lawyer whose lady had heard of Adrienne’s marvellous talent, and, to encourage it, got up a theatre for her and her equally young comrades, in the cour of her own mansion. The acting of the hatter’s daughter, especially as Pauline, in Corneille’s ‘Polyeucte,’ made such a sensation that the jealous Comédie Française cried ‘Privilège!’ and this private theatre was closed, according to law.

We have less interest in recalling the figure of Madame de Pompadour, playing and warbling the chief parts in the sparkling little operettas on the stage of her private theatre at Bellevue, than we have in recalling the figure of the young Dauphine, Marie-Antoinette, with the counts of Provence and Artois (afterwards Louis XVIII. and Charles X.), with their wives, and clever friends, playing comedy especially, with a grace and perfection which were not always to be found in the professional actor. But what the old king Louis XV. had encouraged in the Pompadour he and his rather gloomy daughters discouraged in Marie-Antoinette. It was not till she was queen, and had profited by the lessons of the singer Dugazon, that the last royal private theatre in France commenced its career of short-lived glory, at Choisy and the Trianon. Louis XVI. never took kindly to these representations. He went to them occasionally, but he disliked seeing the queen on the stage. It is even said that he once directed a solitary hiss at her, as she entered dressed as a peasant. It is further stated that the royal actress stepped forward, and with a demure smile informed the house that the dissatisfied individual might have his money returned by applying at the door. It is a pretty story, but it is quite out of character with the place and the personages, and it may be safely assigned to that greatest of story-tellers, Il Signor Ben Trovato.

Adverse critics have said of Marie-Antoinette’s Rosine, that it was ‘royalement mal jouée.’ Perhaps they opposed the whole system of private acting. This amusement had the advocacy of Montaigne, who was himself a good amateur actor. Of course, the thing may be abused. It was not exemplary for French bishops to go to hear Collé’s gross pieces in private. There was more dignity in Louis XIV. and Madame de Maintenon listening to ‘Esther’ and ‘Athalie,’ acted by the young ladies of Saint-Cyr; and there was less folly in the princes and nobles who began the French Revolution by acting the ‘Mariage de Figaro’ in private, than there was in the Comte d’Artois (afterwards Charles X.) learning to dance on the tight rope, with a view of giving amateur performances to his admiring friends.

Mercier, in his ‘Tableau de Paris,’ under the head ‘Théâtre bourgeois,’ states that in the last quarter of the last century there was a perfect rage for private theatricals in France, and that it extended from the crown to the humblest citizen. He thought that the practice had its uses, but its abuses also; and he counselled simple country-townsmen to leave acting to the amateurs in large cities, where people were not too nice upon morals; where lovers gave additional fire to Orosmane, and the timidest young ladies found audacity enough to play Nanine. Mercier had seen the private theatricals at Chantilly, and he praises the care, taste, and simple grace which distinguished the acting of the Prince of Condé and the Duchess of Bourbon. It is very clear that if they had not been cast for the genteelest comedy in the drama of life, they would have got on very well in the world as players. So the Duke of Orleans, at his private theatre at Saint-Assise, pleased Mercier by the care and completeness of his acting. ‘The Queen of France,’ he adds, ‘has private theatricals, in her own apartments, at Versailles. Not having had the honour to see her I can say nothing on the subject.’

With these players of lofty social quality, Mercier contrasts the amateurs in humble society. These were given to act tragedy—or nothing. He cites, from ‘Le Babillard,’ the case of a shoemaker, renowned for his skill in gracefully fitting the most gracefully small feet of the beauties of the day. On Sundays, Crispin drew on his own legs the buskins which he himself or his journeymen had made; and he acted, in his own house, the lofty tragedy then in vogue. It happened once that his manager, with whom he had quarrelled, had to provide a dagger to be deposited on an altar, for the amateur player’s suicidal use. Out of spite, the fellow placed there the shoemaker’s professional cutting-knife. The amateur, in the fury of his acting, and not perceiving the trick, snatched up the weapon, and gave himself the happy despatch with the instrument which helped him to live. This stage business excited roars of laughter, which brought the tragedy to an end as merrily as if it had been a burlesque. The shoemaker could find nothing to say, by which he might turn the laughter from himself. He was not as witty as the English shoemaker’s apprentice whom his master seized, about this time, on the private stage in Berwick Street, acting no less a character than Richard III., in a very dilapidated pair of buskins. As the angry master pointed to them in scorn, the witty lad sustained his royal quality in his reply: ‘Oh! shoes are things we kings don’t stand upon!’

In England, private theatricals are to be traced back to an early date. We go far enough in that direction, however, by referring to Mary Tudor, the solemn little daughter of Henry VIII., who, with other children, acted before her royal sire, in Greenwich Palace, to the intense delight of her father and an admiring court. Henrietta Maria, Queen of Charles I., is remembered in court and theatrical annals for the grace with which she played in pretty pastoral French pieces, assisted by her ladies, on the private stages at Whitehall and Hampton Court. The private theatricals of the Puritan days were only those which took place surreptitiously, and at the risk of the performers being arrested and punished. Holland House, Kensington, was occasionally the place where the players found refuge and gave a taste of their quality. The ‘good time’ came again; and that greatest of actors, Betterton, with his good and clever wife, taught the daughters of James II. all that was necessary to make those ladies what they both were, excellent actors on their private stage. So Quin taught the boy to speak, who afterwards became George III., and who was a very fair private player, but perhaps not equal with his brothers and sisters, and some of the young nobility who trod the stage for pastime, and gave occupation to painters and engravers to reproduce the mimic scene and the counterfeit presentments of those who figured therein.

It was in the reign of George III., and in the year 1777, that the year itself was inaugurated on the part of the fashionable amateurs by a performance of ‘The Provoked Husband.’ Lord Villiers was at the cost of getting it up, but that was nothing to a man who was the prince of macaronies, and who, as Walpole remarks, had ‘fashioned away’ all he possessed. The play, followed by a sort of pose plastique, called ‘Pygmalion and the Statue,’ was acted in a barn, expensively fitted up for the occasion, near Henley. Lord Villiers and Miss Hodges were Lord and Lady Townley. Walpole says, on hearsay, that ‘it went off to admiration.’ Mrs. Montagu, also on report, says: ‘I suppose the merit of this entertainment was, that people were to go many miles in frost and snow, to see in a barn what would have been every way better at the theatre in Drury Lane or Covent Garden.’ Walpole speaks of M. Texier’s Pygmalion as ‘inimitable.’ The Frenchman was at that time much patronised in town for his ‘readings.’ Miss Hodges acted the Statue. Mrs. Montagu’s sharp criticism takes this shape: ‘Modern nymphs are so warm and yielding that less art than that of M. Texier might have animated the nymph. My niece will never stand to be made love to before a numerous audience.’ The Lady Townley and Galatea of these gay doings sacrificed herself, we suppose, to these important duties. ‘Miss Hodges’ father,’ writes Mrs. Montagu, ‘is lately dead: her mother is dying. How many indecorums the girl has brought together in one petite pièce!’ The play was not all the entertainment of the night, which was one of the most inclement of that pitiless winter. ‘There was a ball,’ says the lady letter-writer, ‘prepared after the play, but the barn had so benumbed the vivacity of the company, and the beaux’ feet were so cold and the noses of the belles were so blue, many retired to a warm bed at the inn at Henley, instead of partaking of the dance.’ Walpole gives play to his fancy over these facts. ‘Considering,’ he says, ‘what an Iceland night it was, I concluded the company and audience would all be brought to town in waggons, petrified, and stowed in a statuary’s yard in Piccadilly.’

We have heard over and over again of such private theatres as Winterslow, near Salisbury, which was burnt down on the night after a performance in which Fox and similar spirits had acted with equal vivacity in tragedy and farce. Other incidents are to be found in Walpole and similar gossiping chroniclers of the time. None of those private theatres, however, can match with Wargrave, in Berkshire, where, in the last century, Lord Barrymore held sway during his brief and boisterous life. When Lord Barrymore succeeded to the lordship of himself, that ‘heritage of woe,’ he came before the world with a splendour so extravagant in its character that the world was aghast at his recklessness. Wild and audacious as was the character of this wayward boy’s life, he was in some sort a gentleman in his vices. He was brave and generous and kindly hearted. Since his time we have had a line (now extinct, or effete in the infirmity and imbecility of a surviving member or two) of gentlemen who plunged into blackguardism as a relief from the burden of life. They would play loosely at cards, swindle a dear friend at horse-dealing, and half a dozen of them together would not be afraid to fall upon some helpless creature and beat him into pulp by way of a ‘lark.’ Lord Barrymore was simply a ‘rake,’ and he injured no man but himself. He came into the hunting field more like a king of France and Navarre than an English gentleman, and his negro trumpeters played fantasias in the woods, to the infinite surprise, no doubt, of the foxes. He kept perpetual open house, and Mrs. Delpini superintended it for him. What he most prided himself upon was his taste for the drama, and the way he carried it into effect made Wargrave brilliant and famous in its little day.

This noble youth began modestly enough. His first private theatre was in one of his own barns. The first piece played in it was ‘Miss in her Teens,’ in which he acted Flash; and no one of the illustrious performers, youth or maiden, was over seventeen years of age. Noble by birth, as all the amateur Thespians were, this performance was not given to an exclusively aristocratic audience, but to all the villagers and the peasantry in the vicinity of the village who cared to come. All came, and there was a pit of red cloaks and smock frocks, and ample provision of creature comforts for the whole barn. From this modest origin sprang the noble theatre which Cox of Covent Garden Theatre built for the earl at a cost of 60,000l. It was a marvellous edifice. For pantomimic performances it had traps and springs and other machinery that might satisfy the requirements of Mr. George Conquest himself, who practised gymnastics, for exercise, when he was a student at a German university, and who is now the first of gymnastic performers instead of being the profoundest of philosophers—though there is no reason why he may not be both.

The Wargrave theatre lacked nothing that could be wanted for its completeness. The auditorium was splendid. There was a saloon quite as superb, wherein the audience could sup like kings and the invited could afterwards dance. Between the acts of performance pages and lackeys, in scarlet and gold, proffered choice refreshments to the spectators, who were not likely to be hard upon players under a management of such unparalleled liberality. The acting company was made up of professional players—Munden, Delpini, and Moses Kean, among the men, with the best and prettiest actresses of the Richmond Theatre. Lord Barrymore and Captain Walthen were the chief amateurs. Low comedy and pantomime formed the ‘walk’ of my lord, who on one occasion danced a celebrated pas Russe with Delpini as it was then danced at the opera. Now and then the noble proprietor would stand disguised as a check-taker, and promote ‘rows’ with the farmers and their wives, disputing the validity of their letters of invitation. It was also his fond delight to mingle with them, in disguise again, as they wended homeward, listening to or provoking their criticism. He probably heard some unwelcome truths, for he could not have long escaped detection. Within doors the night’s pleasures were not at an end with the play. Dancing, gambling, music, and folly to its utmost limits succeeded; and he, or she, was held in scorn who attempted to go to bed before 5 A.M. Indeed, such persons were not allowed to sleep if they did withdraw before the appointed hour. From five o’clock to noon was the Wargrave season for sleep. The company were consigned to the ‘upper and lower barracks,’ as the two divisions were called where the single and the married, or those who might as well have been, were billeted for the night.

Lord Barrymore did not confine himself to acting on a private stage. In August, 1790, he ‘was so humble as to perform a buffoon dance and act scaramouch in a pantomime at Richmond for the benefit of Edwin junior, the comedian; and I,’ writes Walpole, ‘like an old fool, but calling myself a philosopher that loves to study human nature in all its disguises, went to see the performance!’ Walpole used to call the earl ‘the strolling player.’ On the above occasion, however, there is one thing to be remembered: Lord Barrymore, invited to play the fool, condescended to that degradation in order to serve young Edwin, whose affection and filial duty towards a sick and helpless mother had won the noble amateur’s regard.

Lord Barrymore married in 1792, in which year the splendid theatre at Wargrave was pulled down. In March, 1793, he was, as captain of militia, escorting some French prisoners through Kent. On his way he halted at an inn to give them and his own men refreshment; which being done, he kissed the handsome landlady and departed in his phaeton, his groom mounting the horse Lord Barrymore had previously ridden. The man put a loaded gun into the carriage, and Lord Barrymore had not ridden far when it exploded and killed him on the spot. Thus ended, at the age of twenty-four years, the career of the young earl, who was the most indefatigable, if not the most able, amateur actor of his day.

Such examples fired less noble youths, who left their lawful callings, broke articles and indentures, and set up for themselves by representing somebody else. Three of our best bygone comedians belong to this class, and may claim some brief record at our hands.

Oxberry, who was distinguished for the way in which he acted personages who were less remarkable for their simplicity than for their silliness, was a pupil of Stubbs, the animal painter, and subsequently was in the house of Ribeau, the bookseller. The attractions of the private theatres in Queen Anne Street and Berwick Street were too much for him. Oxberry’s first appearance was made at the former place, as Hassan, in the ‘Castle Spectre.’ The well-known players, Mrs. W. West and John Cooper, acted together as Alonzo and Leonora in ‘The Revenge,’ at a private theatre in Bath, to the horror of their friends and the general scandalising of the city of which they were natives. The Bath manager looked on the young pair with a business eye, and the youthful amateurs were soon enrolled among the professionals. In their first stages, professionals scarcely reckon above amateurs. They play what they can, and such comic actors as Wilkinson and Harley are not the only pair of funny fellows upon record who played the most lofty tragedy in opposition to each other. Little Knight, as he used to be called, was, like Long Oxberry, intended for art, but he too took to private acting, and passed thence to the stage, where he was supreme in peasants, and particularly rustics, of sheer simplicity of character. His Sim in ‘Wild Oats’ was an exquisite bit of acting, and this is said without any disparagement of Mr. D. James, who recently acted the part at Mr. Belmore’s benefit with a natural truthfulness which reminded old play-goers of the ‘real old thing.’ If Mr. Knight did not succeed in pictorial art, he left a son who did—the gentleman who so recently retired from the secretaryship of the Royal Academy. The two names of Knight and Harley were, for a long time, pleasant in the ears of the patrons of the drama. John Pritt Harley was intended for many things, but amateur acting made a capital comedian of him. His father was a reputable draper and mercer—and jealous actors used to say that he sold stays and that his son helped to make them. The truth is that he was first devoted to surgery, but Harley ‘couldn’t abide it.’ Next he tried the law, and sat on a stool with the edge of a desk pressing into him till he could bear it no longer. There was, at the time, a company of amateurs who performed in the old Lyceum, and there, and at other private theatres, Harley worked away as joyously as he ever played; and worked harder still through country theatres, learning how to starve as well as act, and to fancy that a cup of tea and a penny loaf made a good dinner—which no man could make upon them. His opportunity came when, in 1815, Mr. Arnold, who had watched some part of his progress, brought him out at the Lyceum—his old amateur playing ground—as Marcelli, in ‘The Devil’s Bridge.’ Harley lived a highly-esteemed actor and a most respectable bachelor. Some little joking used to be pointed at him in print, on account of an alleged attachment between him and Miss Tree, the most graceful of dancers and of columbines. But Miss Tree was a Mrs. Quin—though she had scarcely seen her husband, since she was compelled to marry him in her childhood. The nicest pointed bit of wit was manufactured in a hoaxing announcement of a benefit to be taken by both parties. The pieces advertised were ‘A Tale of Mystery,’ and a ‘Harley-Quinade.’ The names of the parties could not have been more ingeniously put together in sport. Harley, though a mannerist, was an excellent actor to the last. When he was stricken with apoplexy, while playing Bottom, in the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ at the Princess’s Theatre, in Charles Kean’s time, he was carried home, and the last words he uttered were words in his part: ‘I feel an exposition to sleep coming over me.’ And straightway the unconscious speaker slept—for aye!

We must not add to the grievances of Ireland by altogether overlooking Erin’s private theatricals. From the day in 1544, when Bale’s ‘Pammachius’ was acted by amateurs at the market cross of Kilkenny, to the last recent record of Irish amateur acting, in the ‘Dublin Evening Mail,’ this amusement has been a favourite one among the ‘West Britons.’ The practice did not die out at the Union. Kilkenny, Lurgan, Carton, and Dublin had their private stages. When the amateur actors played for charity’s sake everybody took private boxes and nobody paid for them. In 1761, the ‘Beggars’ Opera’ was played at the Duke of Leinster’s (Carton). Dean Marly played Lockit, and wrote and spoke the prologue, in which the reverend gentleman thus alluded to himself:

But when this busy mimic scene is o’er

All shall resume the worth they had before;

Lockit himself his knavery shall resign,

And lose the Gaoler in the dull Divine.

The above was not quite as dignified as Milton’s ‘Arcades,’ played by the children of the Dowager Countess of Derby, at her house, Harefield Place; or as ‘Comus,’ acted by the young Egertons before the Earl of Bridgewater, at Ludlow Castle. Perhaps it was more amusing.

One of our own best amateur actresses was the Princess Mary of Cambridge (now Duchess of Teck). This excellent lady had once to commence the piece (a musical piece, written for the occasion by an amateur) on a private stage in one of the noblest of our country mansions. An illustrious audience was waiting for the curtain to go up; but the kindly-hearted princess was thinking of some less illustrious folks, who were not among that audience and whom she desired to see there, namely, the servants of the household—as many as could be spared. They had had much trouble, and she hoped they would be allowed to share in the amusement. There was some difficulty; but it was only when she was informed that the servants were really ‘in front,’ that the ‘Queen of Hearts’ (her part in the piece) answered that she was ready to begin the play. She never acted better than on this occasion.

THE SMELL OF THE LAMPS.

As we look at the two volumes of Mr. Planché’s autobiography we experience a sensation of delight. They remind us of a story told of Maria Tree, long after she had become Mrs. Bradshaw, and was accustomed to luxuries unknown in her early and humble life. She was one night crossing the stage behind the curtain, on a short way to a private box, when she stopped for a moment, and, as she caught the well-known incense of the foot-lights, joyously exclaimed, ‘The smell of the lamps! How I love it!’ Therewith she spoke of the old times, when she worked hard—that is, ‘played,’ for the support of others as well as for her own support; and what a happy time it was, and how she wished it could all come over again! The noble peer who had the honour of escorting her, looked profoundly edified, smiled good-humouredly, and then completed his duty as escort. Here we open Mr. Planché’s book, and catch from it a ‘smell of the lamps.’ Yes, there must have been—must be—something delicious in it to those who have achieved success. To old play-goers there is a similar delight in books of stage reminiscences which include memories of great actors whom those play-goers have seen in their youth. A few of these still survive to talk of the old glories and to prove by comparison of ‘cast’ that for the costly metal of other days we have nothing now but pinchbeck. We have heard one of the old gentlemen of the ancien régime talk, with unfeigned emotion, of the way in which ‘The Gamester’ used to be acted by Mrs. Siddons, John Kemble, Charles Kemble, and George Frederick Cooke. How ladies sobbed and found it hard to suppress a shriek; how gentlemen veiled their eyes to hide the impertinent tears, and tried to look as if nothing were the matter; and, how people who had seen the dreadful tragedy more than once, and dreaded to witness it again, were so fascinated that they would stand in the box-passages gazing through the glass panels of the box doors, beholding the action of the drama, but sparing themselves the heartbreaking utterances of the chief personages. Within a few weeks we have heard a veteran play-goer give imitations of John Kemble in ‘Coriolanus,’ which he last played more than half a century ago! It had the perfect enunciation which was the chief merit of the Kemble school; it was dignified; it gave an idea of a grand actor, and it was a pleasure conferred on the hearers such as Charles Mathews the elder used to confer on his audiences ‘At Home,’ when he presented them with Tate Wilkinson, and they were delighted to make acquaintance with the famous man who had so long before got, as the old Irishwoman said at Billy Fullam’s funeral, his ‘pit order at last.’

While we wait for a paper-cutter to open the closed pages of Mr. Planché’s book, we will just remark that those were days when audiences were differently arranged to what they are now. In the little summer-house in the Haymarket, when stalls were not yet invented, the two-shilling gallery was the rendezvous of some of the richest tradesmen in Pall Mall and the neighbourhood around. At that period, London tradesmen lived and slept at their places of business. They did not pass their nights at a country house. London audiences were made up almost entirely of London people. In the present day, they are largely made up of visitors from the country. In proportion as travelling companies of actors of merit increase and continue to represent plays sometimes better than they are represented in London, country visitors will cease to go to ‘the play,’ as it is called, in the metropolis, and will find some other resort where they can shuffle off the mortal coil of tediousness which holds them bound during their absence from home.

In good old times the pit was the place, not only for the critics, but for the most eminent men of the day. Indeed, not only eminent men, but ladies also, whose granddaughters, as they sweep into the stalls, would think meanly of their grandmothers and grandfathers, and would shudder at the thought of themselves, being in that vulgar part of the house. It is an excellent vulgarity that sits there. Nineteen out of twenty, perhaps ninety out of a hundred, of persons in the pit are the truest patrons of the drama; they pay for the places; and, generally speaking, the places are made as uncomfortable as if the occupiers were intruders of whom the managers would be glad to get rid.

The best proof of the quality of the old pittites is to be found in the diary of the Right Hon. William Windham (1784-1810). One of the entries in the first-named year records a breakfast with Sir Joshua Reynolds, a visit to Miss Kemble, and ‘went in the evening to the pit with Mrs. Lukin.’ The play was ‘The Gamester.’ A day or two afterwards the great statesman went with Steevens and Miss Kemble to see ‘Measure for Measure.’ ‘After the play,’ writes Windham, ‘went with Miss Kemble to Mrs. Siddons’s dressing-room; met Sheridan there.’ What interest Windham took in that actress is illustrated in another entry: ‘Feb. 1, 1785. Drove to Mrs. Siddons in order to communicate a hint on a passage in Lady Macbeth, which she was to act the next night. Not finding her at home, went to her at the play-house.’ Well might Mrs. Siddons write, on inviting Windham to tea: ‘I am sure you would like it; and you can’t be to learn that I am truly sensible of the honour of your society.’

The pits in the London theatres have undergone as great a change, though a different one, as the pit at the opera, which now only nominally exists, if it exist at all. It is now an area of stalls; the old price for admission is doubled, and the entertainment is not worth an eighth of what charged for it compared with that of the olden time, when for an eight-and-sixpenny pit ticket you had Grisi, Mario, Lablache, and Tamburini, with minor vocalists, thorough artists, in the same opera. What a spectacle was the grand old house! The old aristocracy had their boxes for the season, as they had their town and country houses. You got intimate with them by sight; it was a pleasure to note how the beautiful young daughters of each family grew in gracefulness. You took respectful part in the marriages. At each opening season you marked whether the roses bloomed or paled upon the young cheeks, and you sympathised accordingly. You spoke of Lord Marlshire’s look with a hearty neighbourly feeling, and you were glad that Lady Marlshire really seemed only the eldest sister of a group of beauties who were her daughters. As for the sons of those great families, they were in full dress, sauntering or gossiping in that Elysium ill-naturedly called ‘Fops’ Alley’; they were exchanging recognitions with friends and kinsmen in all parts of the house. If you heard a distant laugh—loud enough where the laughers were moved to it—you might be sure it was caused by Lord Alvanley, who was telling some absurdly jocose story to a group of noble Young Englanders in the pit passage under the boxes. We have seen the quiet entry of a quiet man into a private box make quite a stir. Every stranger felt that the quiet man was a man of mark; he came to snatch a momentary joy, and then away to affairs of state again; he was the prime minister. Dozens of opera-goers have recorded their souvenirs of the old glorious days when the opera, as they say, was an institution, opened only twice a week: whereas each house is merely an ordinary theatre, with audiences that are never, two nights running, chiefly made up of the same habitués. They have told what friendly interest used to be aroused when the Duchess of Kent and her daughter, the Princess Victoria, took their seats every opera night. We seem again to hear a ringing laugh, and we know it comes from the sparkling English lady with an Italian title, the Countess St. Antonio. We seem again to see that marvellously audacious-looking pair, Lady Blessington and Count D’Orsay, gauging the house and appearing to differ as to conclusions. The red face of the Duchess of St. Albans and the almost as ruddy vessel from which her tea was poured have been described over and over again; and, in the records of other chroniclers we fancy that once more there come upon us the voices of two gentlemen who talked so above the singers that a remonstrant ‘Hush!’ went round the building. The offenders were the Duke of Gloucester and Sir Robert Wilson. The soldier would draw out of sight, and the prince would make a sort of apologetic remark in a voice a little higher than that which had given offence. These are reminiscences chronicled in the memoirs, diaries, and fugitive articles of old opera-goers.

Mr. Planché must have been among those ancient lovers of music and of song, and that he should record his experiences is a thing to be grateful for, especially as he writes of the battle and joys of life while he is still in harness and the wreathed bowl is in his hand. In 1818, he began with burlesque—‘Amoroso, King of Little Britain,’ written for amateurs, and taken by Harley, unknown to the author, to Drury Lane. In 1872, after fifty-four years of work, Mr. Planché executed the better portion of ‘Babil and Bijou,’ which, compared with ‘Amoroso,’ is as the Great Eastern steamer to a walnut-shell. We heartily welcome all chroniclers of an art that lives only in the artist, and never survives him in tradition. Our own collection begins with Downes, and Mr. Planché’s emerald-green volumes will find room there. Scores of biographies are ‘squeezing’ room for him. Fred Reynolds’s portrait seems to say, ‘Let Planché come next to me.’ As we look at those dramatic historians we are struck with their usefulness as well as their power of entertaining. For example, a paragraph in one of the most ancient of dramatic chronicles—the ‘Roscius Anglicanus,’ by old Downes, the prompter—is of infinite use to the reputation of Shakespeare. Dryden, who produced his version of ‘The Tempest’ to show how Shakespeare ought to have written it, maintained that after the Restoration our national poet was not much cared for by the people, and that for a long time two plays of Beaumont and Fletcher were acted for one of Shakespeare. In Downes’s record the prompter registers the revival of ‘Hamlet;’ and, without any reference to Dryden, or knowledge, indeed, of his depreciation of Shakespeare, he states that the tragedy in question brought more money to the house and more reputation to the players than any piece by any other author during a great number of years.

To some nameless chronicler we owe a knowledge of the fact that Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ was played on board ship, in Shakespeare’s time, by sailors. Why was this left unnoticed when the royal captain of the Galatea took the chair at the last Theatrical Fund dinner? But for the chroniclers we should be ignorant that, just six hundred years ago, the Chester mysteries and passion-plays were at their highest point of attraction. Indeed, they could never have been unattractive; for all those who undertook to witness the performance during about a month’s season were promised to be relieved from hundreds of years of the fire of purgatory. What a delicious feeling to the earnest play-goer, that the more regularly he went to the play on these occasions, the more pleasantly he would work out his salvation! The different dramatic scenes were represented by the best actors in the Chester trading companies. One would like to know on what principle the distribution of parts was made by the manager. Why should the Tanners have been chosen to play the ‘Fall of Lucifer’? What virtue was there in the Blacksmiths, that they should be especially appointed to enact ‘The Purification’? or, in the Butchers, that they should represent ‘The Temptation’? or, in the Bakers, that they should be deemed the fittest persons to illustrate ‘The Last Supper’? One can understand the Cooks being selected for ‘The Descent into Hell,’ because they were accustomed to stand fire; but what of angelical or evangelical could be found exclusively in the Tailors, that they should be cast for ‘The Ascension’? Were the Skinners, whose mission it was to play ‘The Resurrection,’ not deemed worthy of going higher? Or, were the Tailors lighter men, and more likely to rise with alacrity?

We are inclined to think that the idea of plays being naughty things and players more than naughty persons in the early days is a vulgar error. Plays must have been highly esteemed by the authorities, or Manningtree in Essex (and probably many another place) would not have enjoyed its privilege of holding a fair by tenure of exhibiting a certain number of stage plays annually.

There was undoubtedly something Aristophanic in many of the early plays. There was sharp satire, and sensitive ribs which shrank from the point of it. When the Cambridge University preachers satirised the Cambridge town morals the burgesses took the matter quietly; but when the Cambridge University players (students) caricatured the town manners in 1601, exaggerating their defects on the University stage, there was much indignation.

The presence of Queen Elizabeth at plays in London, and the acting of them in the mansions which she honoured by a visit, are proofs of the dignity of the profession. We have her, in the year last named, at one of the most popular of London theatres, with a bevy of fair listening maids of honour about her. This was in her old age. ‘I have just come,’ writes Chamberlain to Charlton, ‘from the Blackfriars, where I saw her at the play with all her candida auditrices.’ At Christmas time, Carlile writes to Chamberlain, ‘There has been such a small court this Christmas, that the guard were not troubled to keep doors at the plays and pastimes.’

And if the name of Elizabeth should have a sweet savour to actors generally, not less delicious to dramatic memories should be the mayor of Abingdon, in that queen’s time, who invited so many companies of players to give a taste of their quality in that town for fee and reward. If any actor to whom the history of the stage be of interest should turn up at Abingdon, let him get the name of this play-loving mayor, and hang it over the fire-place of the best room of the Garrick, or rather of the club that will be—the social, cosey, comfortable, professional, not palatial nor swellish, but homelike house, that the Garrick was in its humbler and happier days.

Now the companies the Mayor had down to Abingdon included the Queen’s players, the Earl of Leicester’s players, the players of the Earl of Worcester, of Lord Sussex, of the Earl of Bath, of Lord Berkely, of Lord Shrewsbury, of Lord Derby, and of Lord Oxford. Is there no one who can get at the names of these actors, and of the pieces they played—played for rewards varying from twenty pence to twenty shillings? Will that thoroughly English actor, one of the few accomplished comedians of the well-trained times now left to us, be the more successfully urged to the task, if we remind him that, in 1573, his professional namesake, Mr. Compton, took his players to Abingdon, and earned four shillings by the exercise of their talents?

The Elizabethan time was a very lively one. It had its theatrical cheats and its popular riots. We learn from State records that on the anniversary of the Queen’s accession, November, 1602, ‘One Verner, of Lincoln’s Inn, gave out bills of a play on Bankside, to be acted by persons of account; price of entry, 2s. 6d. or 1s. 6d. Having got most of the money he fled, but was taken and brought before the Lord Chief Justice, who made a jest of it, and bound him over in 5l. to appear at the sessions. The people, seeing themselves deluded, revenged themselves on the hangings, chairs, walls, &c., and made a great spoil. There was much good company, and many noblemen.’

The Queen died in March, 1603. There were the usual ‘blacks,’ but the court and stage were brilliant again by Christmas. Early in January of the following year people were talking of the gay doings, the brilliant dresses, the noble dramas, the grand bear-baitings, the levity, dancing, and the golden play, which had solemnised the Christmas just ended. Thirteen years later Shakespeare died, and in little more than half a century small spirits whispered that he was not such a great spirit himself after all.

In Mr. Planché’s professional autobiography, which makes us as discursive as the biographer himself, there is a seeming inclination to overpraise some actors of the present time at the expense of those whom we must consider their superiors in bygone days. As far as this may tend to show that there is no actor so good but that his equal may in time be discovered, we have no difference with the author of these ‘Recollections.’ It is wonderful how speedily audiences recover the loss of their greatest favourites. Betterton, who restored the stage soon after Monk had restored the monarchy, was called ‘the glory and the grief’ of that stage. The glory while he acted and lived in the memories of those who had seen him act. To the latter his loss was an abiding grief. For years after Betterton’s decease it was rank heresy to suppose that he might be equalled. Pope, in expressive, yet not the happiest of his verses, has alluded to this prejudice. The prejudice, nevertheless, was unfounded. Betterton remains indeed with the prestige of being an actor who has not been equalled in many parts, who has been excelled in none. Old playgoers, who could compare him in his decline with young Garrick in his vigour, were of different opinions as to the respective merits of these two great masters of their art. We may fairly conclude that Garrick’s Hamlet was as ‘great’ as Betterton’s; that the latter’s Sir John Brute was hardly equal to Garrick’s Abel Drugger; and that the Beverley of the later actor was as perfect an original creation as the Jaffier of Betterton.

When Wilks made the ‘Constant Couple, or a Trip to the Jubilee,’ a success by the spirit and ease with which he played the part of Sir Harry Wildair, Farquhar, the author of the comedy, said ‘That he made the part will appear from hence: whenever the stage has the misfortune to lose him Sir Harry Wildair may go to the Jubilee.’ Nevertheless, Margaret Woffington achieved a new success for that play by the fire and joyousness of her acting. When Wilks died, poets sang in rapturous grief of his politeness, grace, gentility, and ease; and they protested that a supernatural voice had been heard moaning through the air—

Farewell, all manly Joy!

And ah! true British Comedy, adieu!

Wilks is no more.

Notwithstanding this, British comedy did not die; Garrick’s Ranger was good compensation for Wilks’s Sir Harry.

When Garrick heard of Mrs. Cibber’s death, in 1766, he exclaimed, ‘Mrs. Cibber dead! Then tragedy has died with her!’ At that very time a little girl of twelve years of age was strolling from country theatre to country theatre, and she was destined to be an actress of higher quality and renown than even Mrs. Cibber, namely, Sarah Siddons. Mrs. Pritchard could play Lady Macbeth as grandly as Mrs. Siddons; and Mrs. Crawford (Spranger Barry’s widow), who laughed at the ‘paw and pause’ of the Kemble school, was a Lady Randolph of such force and pathos that Sarah feared and hated her. Not many years after Garrick had pronounced Tragedy and Cibber to have expired together, his own death was described as having eclipsed the harmless gaiety of nations, and Melpomene wept with Thalia for their common adopted son, and neither would be comforted. But as Siddons was compensation for Mrs. Cibber, so the Kembles, to use an old simile, formed the very fair small change for Garrick. When Kemble himself departed, his most ardent admirers or worshippers could not assert that his legitimate successor could not be found. Edmund Kean had already supplanted him. The romantic had thrust out the classic; the natural had taken place of the artificial; and Shakespeare, by flashes of the Kean lightning, proved more attractive than the stately eloquence of ‘Cato,’ or the measured cadences of ‘Coriolanus.’

Edmund Kean, however, has never had a successor in certain parts. Mrs. F. Kemble has justly said of him: ‘Kean is gone, and with him are gone Shylock, Richard, and Othello.’ Mrs. Siddons, at her first coming, did not dethrone the old popular favourites. After she had withdrawn from the stage, Miss O’Neill cast her somewhat under the shadow of oblivion; but when old Lady Lucy Meyrick saw Mrs. Siddons’s Lady Macbeth in her early triumph, she acknowledged the fine conception of the character, but the old lady, full of ancient dramatic memories, declared that, compared with Mrs. Pritchard and Mrs. Cibber, Mrs. Siddons’s grief was the grief of a cheesemonger’s wife. Miss Hawkins is the authority for this anecdote, the weak point in which is that in Lady Macbeth the player is not called upon to exhibit any illustration of grief.

We have said that Kean never had a superior in certain parts. Elliston considered himself to be superior in one point; and by referring to some particular shortcoming in other actors Elliston contrived to establish himself as facile princeps of dramatic geniuses—in his own opinion. This we gather from Moncrieff, whom Elliston urged to become his biographer. He would not interfere with Moncrieff’s treatment of the subject. ‘I will simply call your attention, my dear fellow,’ said Elliston, ‘to three points, which you may find worthy of notice, when you draw your parallels of great actors. Garrick could not sing; I can. Lewis could not act tragedy; I can. Mossop could not play comedy; I can. Edmund Kean never wrote a drama; I have.’ In the last comparison Elliston was altogether out. In the cheap edition of ‘Their Majesties’ Servants’ I have inserted a copy of a bill put up by Kean, in 1811, at York, in the ball-room of the Minster Yard of which city Edmund Kean and his young wife announced a two nights’ performance of scenes from plays, imitations, and songs, the whole enacted by the poor strolling couple. In that bill Mr. Kean is described as ‘late of the Theatres Royal, Haymarket and Edinburgh, and author of “The Cottage Foundling, or Robbers of Ancona,” now preparing for immediate representation at the theatre Lyceum.’ We never heard of this representation having taken place. Hundreds of French dramas once came into the cheap book market from the Lyceum, where they had been examined for the purpose of seeing whether any of them could be made useful in English dresses. Some of them undoubtedly were. Kean’s manuscript drama may still be lying among the Arnold miscellanies; if found, we can only hope that the owner will make over ‘The Cottage Foundling and the Robbers of Ancona’ to the Dramatic College. The manuscript would be treasured there as long as the College itself lasts. How long that will be we cannot say; probably as long as the College serves its present profitable purpose. We could wish that the emeriti players had a more lively lookout. A view from its doorway over the heath is as cheerful as that of an empty house to the actor who looks through the curtain at it on his benefit night!

Edmund Kean’s loss has not been supplied as Mrs. Siddons’s was, to a certain extent, and to that actress’s great distaste, by Miss O’Neill; but Drury Lane has flourished with and by its Christmas pantomimes. Audiences cannot be what they were in Mr. Planché’s younger days. They examine no coin that is offered to them. They take what glitters as real currency, and are content. When we were told the other day of a player at the Gaiety representing Job Thornberry in a moustache, we asked if the pit did not shave him clean out of the comedy? Job Thornberry in a moustache! ‘Well,’ was the rejoinder, ‘he only follows suit. He imitates the example of Mr. Sothern, who played Garrick in a moustache.’ We were silent, and thought of the days when actors dressed their characters from portraits, as William Farren did his Frederick and his Charles XII.

If Mr. Planché’s book had not been as suggestive as it is purely historical we should not have been so long coming to it. But he records a fact or makes a reflection, and straightway a reader, who has long memories of books or men, goes far back into older records in search of contrasts or of parallels. We come to him now definitely, and do not again mean to let him go, as far as his dramatic experiences are concerned. Mr. Planché makes even his birth theatrical; he says, ‘I believe I made my first appearance in Old Burlington Street on the 27th of February, 1796, about the time the farce begins’ (used to begin?) ‘at the Haymarket, that is, shortly after one o’clock in the morning.’ The Haymarket season, however, ran at that time only from June to September. In spite of ourselves, Mr. Planché’s record of his birth leads us to a subject that is, however, in connection with the record. We find that Mr. Planché was not only of the Kemble and Kean periods, since which time the stage has been ‘nothing’ especial, but that he was born under both. On the night of his birth John Kemble played Manly in ‘The Plain Dealer,’ with a cast further including Jack Bannister, the two Palmers, Dodd, Suett, and Mrs. Jordan! Think of the dolls and puppets and groups of sticks whom people are now asked to recognise as artists, and who gain more in a night than the greatest of the above-named players earned in a week. A few nights later Edmund Kean, if he himself is to be credited rather than theatrical biographers, made his first appearance on any stage as the ‘Robber’s Boy’ on the first night the ‘Iron Chest’ was acted—a play in which the boy was destined to surpass, in Sir Edward Mortimer, the original representative, John Kemble. At the other house little Knight, the father of the present secretary of the Royal Academy, made his début in London; and the father of Mr. Macready was playing utility with a finish that, if he were alive to do it now, would entitle him to a name on ‘posters’ three feet high, and to the sarcasm of managers, who readily pay comedians who ‘draw’ and laugh at them and at the public who are drawn by them. But here is Mr. Planché waiting.

Well! he seems to have been backward in speaking; though he says, as a proof to the contrary, that he spoke Rolla’s speech to his soldiers shortly after he had found his own. ‘Pizarro,’ we will observe, was not produced till 1799, and was not printed then. But, on the other hand, Mr. Planché, like Pope, seems to have lisped in numbers, for at ten he wrote odes, sonnets, and particularly an address to the Spanish patriots, which he describes as ‘really terrible to listen to.’ When he passed into his teens, the serious question of life turned up. He could not be made to be a watchmaker, the calling of his good father, a French refugee. Barrister, artist, geometrician, cricketer, were vocations which were considered and set aside. His tutor in geometry died before the pupil could discover the quadrature of the circle; and the other callings not seeming to give him a chance, Mr. Planché bethought himself that, as he was fond of writing, he was especially qualified to become a bookseller. It was while he was learning this métier that his dramatic propensities were further developed. They had begun early; he had been ‘bribed to take some nasty stuff when an urchin, on one occasion, by the present of a complete harlequin’s suit, mask, wand, and all, and on another by that of a miniature theatre and strong company of pasteboard actors,’ in whose control he enjoyed what Charles Dickens longed to possess—a theatre given up to him, with absolute despotic sway, to do what he liked with, house, actors and pieces, monarch of all he surveyed. Mr. Kent has published this ‘longing’ in his ‘Charles Dickens as a Reader,’ and added one shadow on Dickens’s character to the many which Mr. Forster has made public, and which thoughtful biographers ought to have suppressed. We allude particularly to where Dickens describes his mother as advertising to receive young ladies as pupils in a boarding school, without having the means to make preparations for their reception; also his showing-up of his own father as Micawber; and above all, his recording that he never had forgiven and never would forgive his mother for wishing him to go back to his humble work at the blacking-maker’s instead of to school. The light which thoughtless worshippers place before their favourite saint often blackens him at least as much as it does him honour.

While under articles with the bookseller Mr. Planché amused himself as amateur actor at the then well-known private theatres in Berwick Street, Catherine Street, Wilton Street, and Pancras Street. The autobiographer says he there ‘murdered many principal personages of the acting drama in company with several accomplices who have since risen to deserved distinction upon the public boards.’ He adds, the probability, had he continued his line of art, of his becoming by this time ‘a very bad actor, had not “the sisters three and such odd branches of learning” occasioned me by the merest accident to become an indifferent dramatist.’ He says jocosely that finding nothing in Shakespeare or Sheridan worthy of him, he wrote for amateurs the burlesque entitled ‘Amoroso, King of Little Britain,’ which one of the company showed to Harley, who at once put it on the stage of Drury Lane in April 1818. There, night after night, Queen Coquetinda stabbed Mollidusta, King Amoroso stabbed the Queen, Roastando stabbed Amoroso, who however stabbed his stabber, the too amorous cook—all to excellent music and capitally acted, whether in the love-making, the killing, or the recovery. Drury Lane Theatre is described by Mr. Planché as being at the time ‘in a state of absolute starvation.’ Yet it was a season in which Kean led in tragedy and Elliston in comedy, and David Fisher played Richard and Hamlet as rival to the former, and little Clara Fisher acted part of Richard the Third in ‘Lilliput.’ Drury Lane had not had so good a company for years; and besides revived pieces of sterling merit it brought out ‘Rob Roy the Gregarach,’ and the ‘Falls of Clyde;’ and Kean played Othello and Richard, Hamlet and Reuben Glenroy, Octavian and Sir Giles, Shylock and Luke, Sir Edward Mortimer and King John, Oroonoko, Richard Plantagenet (‘Richard Duke of York’), and Selim (‘Bride of Abydos’); Barabbas (‘Jew of Malta’), Young Norval, Bertram, and, for his benefit, Alexander the Great, Sylvester Daggerwood, and Paul in ‘Paul and Virginia.’ Nevertheless the success of ‘Amoroso’ was the popular feature of that Drury Lane season. It made Mr. Planché become a dramatist in earnest. ‘At this present date,’ he says, ‘I have put upon the stage, of one description and another, seventy-six pieces.’

A LINE OF FRENCH ACTRESSES.

The English stage has not been wanting in an illustrious line of right royal queens of tragedy. Mrs. Barry is the noble founder, and perhaps the noblest queen of that brilliant line. Then came Mrs. Cibber, Mrs. Pritchard, Mrs. Spranger Barry (Mrs. Crawford), Mrs. Siddons (who hated Mrs. Crawford for not abdicating), and Miss O’Neill, whom Mrs. Siddons equally disliked for coming after her.

With all these the lovers of dramatic literature are well acquainted. Of the contemporary line of French tragedy queens very little is known in this country; nevertheless the dynasty is one of great brilliancy, and the details are not without much dramatic interest.

In the year 1644, in the city of Rouen, there lived a family named Desmares, which family was increased in that year by the birth of a little girl who was christened Marie. Corneille, born in the same city, was then eight-and-thirty years of age. Rouen is now proud of both of them—poet and actress. The actress is only known to fame by her married name. The clever Marie Desmares became the wife of the player, Champmeslé. Monsieur was to Madame very much what poor Mr. Siddons was to his illustrious consort. Madame, or Mademoiselle, or La Champmeslé, as she was called indifferently, associated with Corneille by their common birth-place, was more intimately connected with Racine, who was her senior by five years. La Champmeslé was in her twenty-fifth year when she made her début in Paris as Hermione, in Racine’s masterpiece, ‘Andromaque.’ For a long time Paris could talk of nothing but the new tragedy and the new actress. The part from which the piece takes its name was acted by Mdlle. Duparc, whom Racine had carried off from Molière’s company. The author was very much interested in this lady, the wife of a M. Duparc. Madame was, when a widow, the mother of a very posthumous child indeed. The mother died. She was followed to the grave by a troop of the weeping adorers of her former charms, ‘and,’ says Racine, alluding to himself, ‘the most interested of them was half dead as he wept.’

The poet was aroused from his grief by a summons from the king, who, in presence of the sensitive Racine’s bitterest enemy, Louvois, accused him of having robbed and poisoned his late mistress. The accusation was founded on information given by the infamous woman, Voisin, who was a poisoner by passion and profession, and was executed for her devilish practices. The information was found to be utterly false, and Racine, absolved, soon found consolation and compensation.

He became the master of La Champmeslé, and taught her how to play the heroines of the dramas which he wrote expressly for her. She, in her turn, became the mistress of her tutor. Of his teaching indeed she stood in little need, except to learn from him his ideas and object, as author of the play. She was not only sublime, but La Champmeslé was the first sublime actress that had hitherto appeared on the French stage. Madame de Sévigné wrote to her daughter:—

La Champmeslé is something so extraordinary that you have never seen anything like it in all your life. One goes to hear the actress, and not the play. I went to see ‘Ariadne’ for her sake alone. The piece is inspired: the players execrable. But as soon as La Champmeslé comes upon the stage a murmur of gladness runs throughout the house, and the tears of the audience flow at her despair.

The magic of the actress lured Madame de Sévigné’s son, the young Marquis, from the side of Ninon de l’Enclos. ‘He is nothing but a pumpkin fricasseed in snow,’ said the perennial beauty. After the young nobleman thought proper to inform his mother of the interest he took in La Champmeslé, Madame de Sévigné was so proud that she wrote and spoke of her son’s mistress as her daughter-in-law! To her own daughter she wrote as follows of the representation of Racine’s ‘Bajazet,’ in which La Champmeslé acted Roxane:

The piece appeared to me fine. My daughter-in-law seemed to me the most miraculously good actress I had ever seen; a hundred thousand times better than Des Œillets; and I, who am allowed to be a very fair player, am not worthy of lighting the candles for her to act by. Seen near, she is plain, and I am not astonished that my son was ‘choked’ at his first interview with her; but when she breaks into verse she is adorable. I wish you could have come with us after dinner; you would not have been bored. You would probably have shed one little tear, since I let fall a score. You would have admired your sister-in-law.

Two months later the mother sent to her daughter a copy of the piece, and wrote: ‘If I could send you La Champmeslé with it you would admire it, but without her it loses half its value.’

Racine, as Madame de Sévigné said, wrote pieces for his mistress, and not for posterity. ‘If ever,’ she remarked, ‘he should become less young, or cease to be in love, it will be no longer the same thing.’ The interpreter of the poet produced her wonderful effects dressed in exaggerated court costume, and delivering her tirades in a cadenced, sing-song, rise-and-fall style, marking the rhymes rather than keeping to the punctuation. It was the glory of the well-educated arlequin and columbine, ‘dans leur Hostel de Bourgogne,’ to act whole scenes of mock tragedy in the manner of La Champmeslé and her companions. It was such high-toned burlesque as the gifted Robson’s Medea was to the Medea of Ristori.

Lovers consumed fortunes to win the smiles they sought from the plain but attractive actress. Dukes, courtiers, simple gentlemen, flung themselves and all they had at her feet. La Fontaine wrote verses in worship of her, when he was not helping her complaisant husband to write comedies. Boileau, in the most stinging of epigrams, has made the conjugal immorality immortal, and de Sévigné has made the nobly-endowed actress live for ever in her letters.