Note 92 — Chapter XXV

Mr. Harley, as master of the Drury Lane Fund, at the Annual Dinner of that glorious charity, in the June following Grimaldi's death, thus alluded to the assistance which the benevolence of their patrons had conferred on the distinguished mime:—"Yet shall delicacy suffer no violence in adducing one example, for death has hushed his cock-crowing cachination and uproarious merriment. The mortal Jupiter of practical joke—the Michael Angelo of buffoonery, who, if he was Grim-all-day, was sure to make you chuckle at night, he was rendered happy by your bounty. Yes, sirs, this star of eccentric brilliancy in the laughing hemisphere of fun and drollery—this comical reminiscence of 'Me and my Neddy,' 'Mother Goose,' 'Hot Cockles,' and 'Tippitywitchet,' would have set in sorrow but for this institution. You raised his drooping spirit, borne down by domestic calamity; you sustained his sinking frame, prostrated by premature decrepitude; and sheltered him in honourable retirement! Away then with the gloom of fanaticism and the cant of hypocrisy, obscuring the bright face of wit and genius! This is true philanthropy, that buries not its gold in ostentatious charity, but builds its hospital in the human heart."