ESSAYS ON THE ACTED DRAMA IN LONDON CONTRIBUTED TO THE LONDON MAGAZINE (1820)

382

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

These essays, contributed to The London Magazine in 1820, have never been republished in their original form. A great part of them was included in the so-called ‘second edition’ of A View of the English Stage (see the bibliographical note to that work, ante, p. 170), but the essays were cut up and re-arranged, and many passages were left out altogether. In the present edition, all the essays are printed verbatim from The London Magazine, except that a part of Essay No. VI. and the whole of Essay No. X., being plainly the work of another hand, have been omitted.

383

ESSAYS ON THE DRAMA

FROM

THE LONDON MAGAZINE, 1820

No. I

[January, 1820.

In commencing our account of the drama for the year 1820, and turning our eye back, as far as our personal recollection reaches, towards the conclusion of the last century, we do not think we should be justified, by the customary topics of comparison, or privileges of criticism, in making a general complaint of the degeneracy of the stage. Within our remembrance, at least, it has not fallen off to any alarming degree, either in the written or the acted performances. It has changed its style considerably in both these respects, but it does not follow that it has altogether deteriorated: it has shifted its ground, but has found its level. With respect to the pieces brought out, we have got striking melo-drames for dull tragedies; and short farces are better than long ones of five acts. The semper varium et mutabile of the poet, may be transferred to the stage, ‘the inconstant stage,’ without losing the original felicity of the application:—it has its necessary ebbs and flows, from its subjection to the influence of popular feeling, and the frailty of the materials of which it is composed, its own fleeting and shadowy essence and cannot be expected to remain for any great length of time stationary at the same point, either of perfection or debasement. Acting, in particular, which is the chief organ by which it addresses itself to the mind;—the eye, tongue, hand by which it dazzles, charms, and seizes on the public attention—is an art that seems to contain in itself the seeds of perpetual renovation and decay, following in this respect the order of nature rather than the analogy of the productions of human intellect,—for whereas in the other arts of painting and poetry, the standard works of genius being permanent and accumulating, for awhile provoke emulation, but, in the end, overlay future efforts, and transmit only their defects to those that 384come after; the exertions of the greatest actor die with him, leaving to his successors only the admiration of his name, and the aspiration after imaginary excellence: so that in effect ‘no one generation of actors binds another;’ the art is always setting out afresh on the stock of genius and nature, and the success depends (generally speaking) on accident, opportunity, and encouragement. The harvest of excellence (whatever it may be) is removed from the ground every twenty or thirty years, by Death’s sickle; and there is room left for another to sprout up and tower to an equal height, and spread into equal luxuriance—to ‘dally with the wind, and court the sun’—according to the health and vigour of the stem, and the favourableness of the season. But books, pictures, remain like fixtures in the public mind; beyond a certain point incumber the soil of living truth and nature; and distort or stunt the growth of original genius. Again, the literary amateur may find employment for his time in reading old authors only, and exhaust his entire spleen in scouting new ones: but the lover of the stage cannot amuse himself, in his solitary fastidiousness, by sitting to witness a play got up by the departed ghosts of first-rate actors; or be contented with the perusal of a collection of old play-bills:—he may extol Garrick, but he must go to see Kean; and, in his own defence, must admire or at least tolerate what he sees, or stay away against his will. The theatrical critic may grumble a little, at first, at a new candidate for the favour of the town, and say how much better the part must have been done formerly by some actor whom he never saw; but by degrees he makes a virtue of necessity, and submits to be pleased ‘with coy, reluctant, amorous delay’—devoting his attention to the actual stage as he would to a living mistress, whom he selects as a matter of course from the beauties of the present, and not from those of the last age! We think there is for this reason less pedantry and affectation (though not less party-feeling and personal prejudice) in judging of the stage than of most other subjects; and we feel a sort of theoretical, as well as instinctive predilection for the faces of play-going people as among the most sociable, gossipping, good-natured, and humane members of society. In this point of view, as well as in others, the stage is a test and school of humanity. We do not much like any person or persons who do not like plays; and for this reason, viz. that we imagine they cannot much like themselves or any one else. The really humane man (except in cases of unaccountable prejudices, which we do not think the most likely means to increase or preserve the natural amiableness of his disposition) is prone to the study of humanity. Omnes boni et liberales HUMANITATI semper favemus. He likes to see it brought home from 385the universality of precepts and general terms, to the reality of persons, of tones, and actions; and to have it raised from the grossness and familiarity of sense, to the lofty but striking platform of the imagination. He likes to see the face of man with the veil of time torn from it, and to feel the pulse of nature beating in all times and places alike. The smile of good-humoured surprise at folly, the tear of pity at misfortune, do not misbecome the face of man or woman. It is something delightful and instructive, to have seen Coriolanus or King John in the habiliments of Mr. Kemble, to have shaken hands almost with Othello in the person of Mr. Kean, to have cowered before the spirit of Lady Macbeth in the glance of Mrs. Siddons. The stage at once gives a body to our thoughts, and refinement and expansion to our sensible impressions. It has not the pride and remoteness of abstract science: it has not the petty egotism of vulgar life. It is particularly wanted in great cities (where it of course flourishes most) to take off from the dissatisfaction and ennui, that creep over our own pursuits from the indifference or contempt thrown upon them by others; and at the same time to reconcile our numberless discordant incommensurable feelings and interests together, by giving us an immediate and common topic to engage our attention, and to rally us round the standard of our common humanity. We never hate a face that we have seen in the pit: and Liston’s laugh would be a cordial to wash down the oldest animosity of the most inveterate pit-critics.

The only drawback on the felicity and triumphant self-complacency of a play-goer’s life, arises from the shortness of life itself. We miss the favourites, not of another age, but of our own—the idols of our youthful enthusiasm; and we cannot replace them by others. It does not shew that these are worse, because they are different from those: though they had been better, they would not have been so good to us. It is the penalty of our nature, from Adam downwards: so Milton makes our first ancestor exclaim,—

——‘Should God create

Another Eve, and I another rib afford,

Yet loss of thee would never from my heart.’

We offer our best affections, our highest aspirations after the good and beautiful, on the altar of youth: it is well if, in our after-age, we can sometimes rekindle the almost extinguished flame, and inhale its dying fragrance like the breath of incense, of sweet-smelling flowers and gums, to detain the spirit of life, the ethereal guest, a little longer in its frail abode—to cheer and soothe it with the pleasures of memory, not with those of hope. While we can do 386this, life is worth living for: when we can do it no longer, its spring will soon go down, and we had better not be!—Who shall give us Mrs. Siddons again, but in a waking dream, a beatific vision of past years, crowned with other hopes and other feelings, whose pomp is also faded, and their glory and their power gone! Who shall in our time (or can ever to the eye of fancy) fill the stage, like her, with the dignity of their persons, and the emanations of their minds? Or who shall sit majestic in the throne of tragedy—a Goddess, a prophetess and a Muse—from which the lightning of her eye flashed o’er the mind, startling its inmost thoughts—and the thunder of her voice circled through the labouring breast, rousing deep and scarce known feelings from their slumber? Who shall stalk over the stage of horrors, its presiding genius, or ‘play the hostess,’ at the banquetting scene of murder? Who shall walk in sleepless ecstasy of soul, and haunt the mind’s eye ever after, with the dread pageantry of suffering and of guilt? Who shall make tragedy once more stand with its feet upon the earth, and with its head raised above the skies, weeping tears and blood? That loss is not to be repaired. While the stage lasts, there will never be another Mrs. Siddons! Tragedy seemed to set with her; and the rest are but blazing comets or fiery exhalations.—It is pride and happiness enough for us to have lived at the same time with her, and one person more! But enough on this subject. Those feelings that we are most anxious to do justice to, are those to which it is impossible we ever should!

To turn to something less serious. We have not the same pomp of tragedy nor the same gentility, variety, and correctness in comedy. There was the gay, fluttering, hair-brained Lewis; he that was called ‘Gentleman Lewis,’—all life, and fashion, and volubility, and whim; the greatest comic mannerist that perhaps ever lived; whose head seemed to be in his heels, and his wit at his fingers’ ends: who never let the stage stand still, and made your heart light and your head giddy with his infinite vivacity, and bustle, and hey-day animal spirits. We wonder how Death ever caught him in his mad, whirling career, or ever fixed his volatile spirit in a dull caput mortuum of dust and ashes? Nobody could break open a door, or jump over a table, or scale a ladder, or twirl a cocked hat, or dangle a cane, or play a jockey-nobleman, or a nobleman’s jockey, like him. He was at Covent Garden. With him was Quick, who made an excellent self-important, busy, strutting, money-getting citizen; or crusty old guardian, in a brown suit and a bob wig. There was also Munden, who was as good an actor then, as he is now; and Fawcett, who was at that time a much better one than he is at present. He, of late, seems to slur over his parts, 387wishes to merge the actor in the manager, and is grown serious before retiring from the stage. But a few years back (when he ran the race of popularity with Jack Bannister) nobody could give the view holla of a fox-hunting country squire like him; and he sung AMO AMAS, as Lingo in the Agreeable Surprise, in a style of pathos to melt the heart of the young apprentices in the two shilling gallery. But he appears to have grown averse to his profession, and indifferent to the applause he might acquire himself, and to the pleasures he used to give to others. In turbulent and pragmatical characters, and in all that cast of parts which may be called the slang language of comedy, he hardly had his equal. Perhaps he might consider this walk of his art as beneath his ambition; but, in our judgment, whatever a man can do best, is worth his doing. At the same house was little Simmons, who remained there till lately, like a veteran at his post, till he fell down a flight of steps and broke his neck, without any one’s seeming to know or care about the matter. Though one of those ‘who had gladdened life,’ his death by no means ‘eclipsed the gaiety of nations.’ The public are not grateful. They make an effort of generosity, collect all their reluctant admiration into a heap, and offer it up with servile ostentation at the shrine of some great name, which they think reflects back its lustre on the worshippers. Or, like fashionable creditors, they pay their debts of honour for the eclat of the thing, and neglect the claims of humbler but sterling merit; such as was that of Simmons, one of the most correct, pointed, naive, and whimsical comic actors, we have for a long time had, or are likely to have again. He was not a buffoon, but a real actor. He did not play himself, nor play tricks, but played the part the author had assigned him. This was the great merit of the good old style of acting. He fitted into it like a brilliant into the setting of a ring, or as the ring fits the finger. We shall look for him often in Filch, in which his appearance was a continual double entendre, with one eye leering at his neighbour’s pockets, and the other turned to the gallows:—also in the spangled Beau Mordecai, in Moses, in which he had all the precision, the pragmaticalness, and impenetrable secresy of the Jew money-lender; and in my Lord Sands, where he had all the stage to himself, and seemed to fill it by the singular insignificance of his person, and the infinite airs he gave himself. We shall look for him in these and many other parts, but in vain, or for any one equal to him.

At the other house, there was King, whose acting left a taste on the palate, sharp and sweet like a quince; with an old, hard, rough, withered face, like a John-apple, puckered up into a thousand wrinkles; with shrewd hints and tart replies; ‘with nods and becks 388and wreathed smiles;’ who was the real amorous, wheedling, or hasty, choleric, peremptory old gentleman in Sir Peter Teazle and Sir Anthony Absolute; and the true, that is, the pretended, clown in Touchstone, with wit sprouting from his head like a pair of ass’s ears, and folly perched on his cap like the horned owl. There was Parsons too, whom we just remember like a worn-out ‘suit of office’ in Elbow; and Dodd in Acres, who had the most extraordinary way of hitching in a meaning, or subsiding into blank folly with the best grace in nature; and whose courage seemed literally to ooze out of his fingers in the preparations for the duel. There was Suett, the delightful old croaker, the everlasting Dicky Gossip of the stage; and, with him, Jack Bannister, whose gaiety, good humour, cordial feeling, and natural spirits, shone through his characters, and lighted them up like a transparency. Bannister did not go out of himself to take possession of his part, but put it on over his ordinary dress, like a surtout, snug, warm, and comfortable. He let his personal character appear through; and it was one great charm of his acting. In Lenitive, in the Prize, when the beau is ingrafted on the apothecary, he came out of his shell like the aurelia out of the grub; and surely never lighted on the stage, which he hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision—gilding, and cheering the motley sphere he just began to move in—shining like a gilded pill, fluttering like a piece of gold-leaf, gaudy as a butterfly, loud as a grasshopper, full of life, and laughter, and joy. His Scrub, in which he spouts a torrent of home-brewed ale against the ceiling, in a sudden fit of laughter at the waggeries of his brother Martin;—his Son-in-law; his part in the Grandmother; his Autolycus; his Colonel Feignwell; and his Walter in the Children in the Wood, were all admirable. Most of his characters were exactly fitted for him—for his good-humoured smile, his buoyant activity, his kind heart, and his honest face: and no one else could do them so well, because no one else could play Jack Bannister. He was, some time since, seen casting a wistful eye at Drury-lane theatre, and no doubt thinking of past times: others who also cast a wistful eye at it, do not forget him when they think of old and happy times! There were Bob and Jack Palmer, the Brass and Dick of the Confederacy; the one the pattern of an elder, the other of a younger brother. There was Wewitzer, the trustiest of Swiss valets, and the most ‘secret Tattle’ of the stage. There was, and there still is, Irish Johnstone, with his supple knees, his hat twisted round in his hand, his good-humoured laugh, his arched eye-brows, his insinuating leer, and his lubricated brogue, curling round the ear like a well oiled mustachio. These were all the men. Then there was 389Miss Farren, with her fine-lady airs and graces, with that elegant turn of her head, and motion of her fan, and tripping of her tongue; and Miss Pope, the very picture of a Duenna, a maiden lady, or an antiquated dowager—the latter spring of beauty, the second childhood of vanity, more quaint, fantastic, and old-fashioned, more pert, frothy, and light-headed than any thing that can be imagined; embalmed in the follies, preserved in the spirit of affectation of the last age:—and then add to these, Mrs. Jordan, the child of nature, whose voice was a cordial to the heart, because it came from it, rich, full, like the luscious juice of the ripe grape; to hear whose laugh was to drink nectar; whose smile ‘made a sunshine,’ not ‘in the shady place,’ but amidst dazzling lights and in glad theatres:—who ‘talked far above singing,’ and whose singing was like the twang of Cupid’s bow. Her person was large, soft, and generous like her soul. It has been attempted to compare Miss Kelly to her. There is no comparison. Miss Kelly is a shrewd, clever, arch, lively girl; tingles all over with suppressed sensibility; licks her lips at mischief, bites her words in two, or lets a sly meaning out of the corners of her eyes; is fidgetty with curiosity, or unable to stand still for spite:—she is always uneasy and always interesting; but Mrs. Jordan was all exuberance and grace, ‘her bounty was as boundless as the sea; her love as deep.’ It was her capacity for enjoyment, and the contrast she presented to every thing sharp, angular, and peevish, that communicated the same genial heartfelt satisfaction to the spectator. Her Nell, for instance, was right royal like her liquor, and wrapped up in measureless content with lambs’ wool. Miss Kelly is a dextrous knowing chambermaid: Mrs. Jordan had nothing dexterous or knowing about her. She was Cleopatra turned into an oyster-wench, without knowing that she was Cleopatra, or caring that she was an oyster-wench. An oyster-wench, such as she was, would have been equal to a Cleopatra; and an Antony would not have deserted her for the empire of the world!

From the favourite actors of a few years back, we turn to those of the present day: and we shall speak of them, not with grudging or stinted praise.

The first of these in tragedy is Mr. Kean. To show that we do not conceive that tragedy regularly declines in every successive generation, we shall say, that we do not think there has been in our remembrance any tragic performer (with the exception of Mrs. Siddons) equal to Mr. Kean. Nor, except in voice and person, and the conscious ease and dignity naturally resulting from those advantages, do we know that even Mrs. Siddons was greater. In truth of nature and force of passion, in discrimination and originality, 390we see no inferiority to any one on the part of Mr. Kean: but there is an insignificance of figure, and a hoarseness of voice, that necessarily vulgarize, or diminish our idea of the characters he plays: and perhaps to this may be added, a want of a certain correspondent elevation and magnitude of thought, of which Mrs. Siddons’s noble form seemed to be only the natural mould and receptacle. Her nature seemed always above the circumstances with which she had to struggle: her soul to be greater than the passion labouring in her breast. Grandeur was the cradle in which her genius was rocked: for her to be, was to be sublime! She did the greatest things with child-like ease: her powers seemed never tasked to the utmost, and always as if she had inexhaustible resources still in reserve. The least word she uttered seemed to float to the end of the stage: the least motion of her hand seemed to command awe and obedience. Mr. Kean is all effort, all violence, all extreme passion: he is possessed with a fury, a demon that leaves him no repose, no time for thought, or room for imagination. He perhaps screws himself up to as intense a degree of feeling as Mrs. Siddons, strikes home with as sure and as hard a blow as she did, but he does this by straining every nerve, and winding up every faculty to this single point alone: and as he does it by an effort himself, the spectator follows him by an effort also. Our sympathy in a manner ceases with the actual impression, and does not leave the same grand and permanent image of itself behind. The Othello furnishes almost the only exception to these remarks. The solemn and beautiful manner in which he pronounces the farewell soliloquy, is worth all gladiatorship and pantomime in the world. His Sir Giles is his most equal and energetic character: but it is too equal, too energetic from the beginning to the end. There is no reason that he should have the same eagerness, the same impetus at the commencement as at the close of his career: he should not have the fierceness of the wild beast till he is goaded to madness by the hunters. Sir Giles Mompesson (supposed to be the original character) we dare say, took things more quietly, and only grew desperate with his fortunes. Cooke played the general casting of the character better in this respect: but without the same fine breaks and turns of passion. Cooke indeed, compared to Kean, had only the slang and bravado of tragedy. Neither can we think Mr. Kemble equal to him, with all his study, his grace, and classic dignity of form. He was the statue of perfect tragedy, not the living soul. Mrs. Siddons combined the advantage of form and other organic requisites with nature and passion: Mr. Kemble has the external requisites, (at least of face and figure) without the internal workings of the soul: Mr. 391Kean has the last without the first, and, if we must make our election between the two, we think the vis tragica must take precedence of every thing else. Mr. Kean, in a word, appears to us a test, an experimentum crucis, to shew the triumph of genius over physical defects, of nature over art, of passion over affectation, and of originality over common-place monotony.—Next to Mr. Kean, the greatest tragic performer now on the stage is undoubtedly Miss O’Neill. She cannot take rank by the side of her great predecessor, but neither can any other actress be at all compared with her. If we had not seen Mrs. Siddons, we should not certainly have been able to conceive any thing finer than some of her characters, such as Belvidera, Isabella in the Fatal Marriage, Mrs. Beverly, and Mrs. Haller, which (as she at first played them) in tenderness of sensibility, and the simple force of passion, could not be surpassed. She has, however, of late, carried the expression of mental agony and distress to a degree of physical horror that is painful to behold, and which is particularly repulsive in a person of her delicacy of frame and truly feminine appearance.—Mrs. Bunn is a beautiful and interesting actress in the sentimental drama; and in the part of Queen Elizabeth, in Schiller’s Tragedy of Mary Stuart, which she played lately, gave, in the agitation of her form, the distracted thoughts painted in her looks, and the deep but fine and mellow tones of her voice, earnest of higher excellence than she has yet displayed. Her voice is one of the finest on the stage. It resembles the deep murmur of a hive of bees in spring-tide, and the words drop like honey from her lips.—Mr. Macready is, in our opinion, a truly spirited and impassioned declaimer, with a noble voice, and great fervour of manner; but, we apprehend, his forte is rather in giving a loose to the tide of enthusiastic feeling or sentiment, than in embodying individual character, or discriminating the diversity of the passions. There is a gaiety and tip-toe elevation in his personal deportment, which Mr. Kean has not, but in other more essential points there is no room for competition. Of his Coriolanus and Richard, we may have to speak in detail hereafter.

We shall conclude this introductory sketch with a few words on the comic actors. Emery at Covent Garden might be said to be the best provincial actor on the London boards. In his line of rustic characters he is a perfect actor. He would be a bold critic who should undertake to show that in his own walk Emery ever did any thing wrong. His Hodge is an absolute reality; and his Lockitt is as sullen, as gloomy, and impenetrable as the prison walls of which he is the keeper. His Robert Tyke is the sublime of tragedy in low life.—Mr. Liston has more comic humour, more 392power of face, and a more genial and happy vein of folly, than any other actor we remember. His farce is not caricature: his drollery oozes out of his features, and trickles down his face: his voice is a pitch-pipe for laughter. He does some characters but indifferently, others respectably; but when he puts himself whole into a jest, it is unrivalled.—Munden with all his merit, his whim, his imagination, and with his broad effects, is a caricaturist in the comparison. He distorts his features to the utmost stretch of grimace, and trolls his voice about with his tongue in the most extraordinary manner, but he does all this with an evident view to the audience: whereas Liston’s style of acting is the unconscious and involuntary; he indulges his own risibility or absurd humours to please himself, and the odd noises he makes come from him as naturally as the bleating of a sheep.—Elliston is an actor of great merit, and of a very agreeable class: there is a joyousness in his look, his voice, and manner; he treads the stage as if it was his ‘best-found, and latest as well as earliest choice;’ writes himself comedian in any book, warrant, or acquittance; hits the town between wind and water, between farce and tragedy; touches the string of a mock heroic sentiment with due pathos and vivacity; and makes the best strolling gentleman, or needy poet, on the stage. His Rover is excellent: so is his Duke in the Honeymoon; and in Matrimony he is best of all.—Dowton is a genuine and excellent comedian; and, in speaking of his Major Sturgeon, we cannot pass over, in disdainful silence, Russell’s Jerry Sneak, and Mrs. Harlowe’s Miss Molly Jollop. Oxberry is an actor of a strong rather than of a pleasant comic vein (his Mawworm is particularly emphatical). Harley pleases others, for he seems pleased himself; and little Knight, in the simplicity and good nature of the country lad, is inimitable.

Of the particular parts in which these and other performers display their talents to advantage, we must speak in future articles on this subject; as well as of the merits of the modern drama itself; the management of our theatres; and a variety of other topics, to which we propose to give the best attention in our power—determined neither to ‘extenuate, nor set down aught in malice.’

L. M.

No. II

[February, 1820.

Since we wrote a former article on this subject, the stage has lost one of its principal ornaments and fairest supports, in the person of Miss O’Neill. As Miss Somerville changed her name for that of 393Mrs. Bunn, and still remains on the stage, so Miss O’Neill has altered hers for Mrs. Beecher, and has, we fear, quitted us for good and all. ‘There were two upon the house-top: one was taken, and the other was left!’ Though, on our own accounts, we do not think this ‘a consummation devoutly to be wished,’ yet we cannot say we are sorry on her’s. Hymen has, in this instance, with his flaming torch and saffron robe, borne a favourite actress from us, and held her fast, beyond the seas and sounding shores, ‘to our moist vows denied’: but, whatever complaints or repinings have been heard on the occasion, we think Miss O’Neill was in the right to do as she has done. Fast bind fast find, is an old proverb, and a good one, and is no doubt applicable to both sexes, and on both sides of the water. A husband, like death, cancels all other claims, and we think, more especially, any imaginary and imperfect obligations, (with a clipt sixpence, and clap hands and a bargain) to the stage or to the town. Miss O’Neill, (for so her name may yet linger on our tongues) made good her retreat in time from the world’s ‘slippery turns,’ and we are glad that she has done so. It is better to retire from the stage, when young, with fame and fortune, than to have to return to it when old (as Mrs. Crawfurd, Mrs. Abington, and so many others have done) in poverty, neglect, and scorn. There is no marriage for better and for worse to the public; it is but a ‘Mr. Limberham, or Kind Keeper,’ at the very best: it does not tie itself to worship its favourites, or ‘with its worldly goods them endow,’ through good report, or evil report, in sickness or in health, ‘till death them do part.’ No such thing is even thought of: they must be always young, always beautiful, and dazzling, and allowed to be so; or they are instantly discarded, and they pass from their full-blown pride, and the purple light that irradiates them, into ‘the list of weeds, and wornout faces.’ If a servant of the theatre dismisses himself without due warning, it makes a great deal of idle talk: but, on the other hand, does the theatre never dismiss one of its servants without formal notice, and is any thing then said about it? How many old favourites of the town—that many-headed abstraction, with new opinions, whims, and follies ever sprouting from its teeming brain; how many decayed veterans of the stage, do we remember, in the last ten or twenty years, laid aside ‘in monumental mockery’; thrown from the pinnacle of prosperity and popularity, to pine in poverty and obscurity, their names forgotten, or staring in large capitals, asking for a benefit at some minor theatre! How many of these are to be seen, walking about with shrunk shanks and tattered hose, avoiding the eye of the stranger whom they suppose to have known them in better days; straggling through the streets with faultering steps, and on 394some hopeless errand,—with sinking hearts, or heart-broken long ago:—engaged, dismissed again, tampered with, tantalised, trifled with, pelted, hooted, scorned, unpitied: performing quarantine at a distance from the centre of all their hopes and wishes, as if their names were a stain on their former reputations;—or perhaps received once more,—tolerated, endured out of charity, in the very places that they once adorned and gladdened by their presence!—And all this, often without any fault in themselves, any misconduct, any change, but in the taste and humour of the audience; or from their own imprudence, in not guarding (while they had the opportunity) against the ingratitude and treachery of that very public, that claims them as its property, and would make them its slaves and puppets for life—or during pleasure! We might make out a long list of superannuated pensioners on public patronage, who have had the last grudging pittance of favour withdrawn from them, but that it could do no sort of good, and that we would not expose the names themselves to the gaze and wonder of vulgar curiosity. We are only not sorry that Miss O’Neill has put it out of the power of the Nobility, the Gentry, and her Friends in general, to add her name to the splendid, tarnished list; and that she cannot, like so many of her predecessors, be chopped and changed, and hacked, and banded about, in tragedy, or in comedy, in farce or in pantomime, in dance or song, at the Surry, or the Cobourg, or the Sans Pareil Theatres; or even be sent to mingle her silvery cadences with Mr. Kean’s hoarse notes at Old Drury!

Before, however, we take leave of her for ever in that capacity in which she has so often delighted, and so often astonished us, we must be excused in saying a few parting words of that excellence, which, for the future, can be known (how very imperfectly!) only by description, and be remembered only as an enchanting dream. We believe that ladies, even after the marriage ceremony, sign their maiden names in the church-register: we hope that Miss O’Neill will not refuse to subscribe, in the same manner, to our critical jurisdiction, for the last time that we shall have to exercise it upon her.

Miss O’Neill was in size of the middle form: her complexion was fair: and her person not inelegant. She stooped somewhat in the shoulders, but not so as to destroy grace or dignity:—in moving across the stage, she dragged a little in her step, with some want of firmness and elasticity. The action of her hands and arms, however (one of the least common, and therefore, we suppose, one of the most difficult accomplishments an actor or actress has to acquire) was perfectly just, simple and expressive. They either remained in 395unconscious repose by her side, or, if employed, it was to anticipate or confirm the language of the eye and tongue. There was no affectation, no unmeaning display, or awkward deficiency in her gesticulation; but her body and mind seemed to be under the guidance of the same impulse, to move in concert, and to be moulded into unity of effect by a certain natural grace, earnestness, and good sense. The contour of her face was nearly oval; and her features approached to the regularity of the Grecian outline. The expression of them was confined either to the extremity of pain and agony, or to habitual softness and placidity, with an occasional smile of great sweetness. Her voice was deep, clear, and mellow, capable of the most forcible exertion, but, in ordinary speaking, ‘gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman!’ She, however, owed comparatively little to physical qualifications: there was nothing in her face, voice, or person, sufficiently striking to have obtruded her into notice, or to have been a factitious substitute for other requisites. Her external advantages were merely the medium through which her internal powers displayed their refulgence, without obstruction or refraction (with the exception hereafter to be stated): they were the passive instruments, which her powerful and delicate sensibility wielded, with the utmost propriety, ease, and effect. Her excellence (unrivalled by any actress since Mrs. Siddons) consisted in truth of nature, and force of passion. Her correctness did not seem the effect of art or study, but of instinctive sympathy, of a conformity of mind and disposition to the character she was playing, as if she had unconsciously become the very person. There were no catching lights, no pointed hits, no theatrical tricks, no female arts resorted to, in her best or general style of acting: there was a singleness, an entireness, and harmony in it, that gave it a double charm as well as a double power. It rested on the centre of its own feelings. Her style of acting was smooth, round, polished, and classical, like a marble statue; self-supported, and self-involved; owing its resemblance to life, to the truth of imitation; not to startling movements, and restless contortion, but returning continually within the softened line of beauty and nature. Her manner was, in this respect, the opposite of Mr. Kean’s, of whom no man can say (either in a good or in a bad sense) that he is like a marble statue, but of whom it may be said, with some appearance of truth, that he is like a paste-board figure, the little, uncouth, disproportioned parts of which, children pull awry, twitch, and jerk about in fifty odd and unaccountable directions, to laugh at—or like the mock figure of Harlequin, that is stuck against the wall, and pulled in pieces, and fastened together again, with twenty idle, pantomimic, eccentric absurdities! Or he seems to have St. Antony’s 396fire in his veins, St. Vitus’s dance in his limbs, and a devil tugging at every part:—one shrugging his shoulders, another wagging his head, another hobbling in his legs, another tapping his breast; one straining his voice till it is ready to crack, another suddenly, and surprisingly, dropping it down into an inaudible whisper, which is made distinct and clear by the ‘bravos’ in the pit, and the shouts of the gallery. There was not any of this paltry patch-work, these vulgar snatches at applause, these stops, and starts, and breaks, in Miss O’Neill’s performance, which was sober, sedate, and free from pretence and mummery. We regret her loss the more, and fear we shall have to regret it more deeply every day. In a word, Mr. Kean’s acting is like an anarchy of the passions, in which each upstart humour, or phrensy of the moment, is struggling to get violent possession of some bit or corner of his fiery soul and pigmy body—to jostle out, and lord it over, the rest of the rabble of short-lived, and furious purposes. Miss O’Neill seemed perfect mistress of her own thoughts, and if she was not indeed the rightful queen of tragedy, she had at least all the decorum, grace, and self-possession of one of the Maids of Honour waiting around its throne.—Miss O’Neill might have played, to the greatest advantage, in one of the tragedies of Sophocles, which are the perfection of the stately, elegant, and simple drama of the Greeks; we cannot conceive of Mr. Kean making a part of any such classical group. Perhaps, however, we may magnify his defects in this particular, as we have been accused of over-rating his general merits. We do not think it an easy matter ‘to praise him, or blame him too much.’ We have never heard any thing to alter the opinion we always entertained of him: he can only do it himself—by his own acting. While we owe it to him to speak largely of his genius and his powers, we owe it to the public to protest against the eccentricities of the one, or the abuses of the other.

To return from this digression. With all the purity and simplicity, Miss O’Neill possessed the utmost force of tragedy. Her soul was like the sea, calm, beautiful, smiling, smooth, and yielding; but the storm of adversity lashed it into foam, laid bare its centre, or heaved its billows against the skies. She could repose on gentleness, or dissolve in tenderness, and at the same time give herself up to all the agonies of woe. She could express fond affection, pity, rage, despair, madness. She felt all these passions in their simple and undefinable elements only. She felt them as a woman,—as a mistress, as a wife, a mother, or a friend. She seemed to have the most exquisite sense of the pressure of those soft ties, that were woven round her heart, and that bound her to her place in society; and the rending them asunder appeared to give a proportionable revulsion to her frame, and 397disorder to her thoughts. There was nothing in her acting of a preternatural or ideal cast—that could lift the mind above mortality, or might be fancied to descend from another sphere. But she gave the full, the true, and unalloyed expression, to all that is common, obvious, and heart-felt in the charities of private life, and in the conflict of female virtue and attachment with the hardest trials and intolerable griefs. She did not work herself up to the extremity of passion, by questioning with her own thoughts; or raise herself above circumstances, by ascending the platform of imagination; or arm herself against fate, by strengthening her will to meet it: no, she yielded to calamity, she gave herself up entire, and with entire devotion, to her unconquerable despair:—it was the tide of anguish swelling in her own breast, that overflowed to the breasts of the audience, and filled their eyes with tears as the loud torrent projects itself from the cliff to the abyss below, and bears everything before it in its resistless course. The source of her command over public sympathy, lay, in short, in the intense conception, and unrestrained expression, of what she, and every other woman, of natural sensibility would feel in given circumstances, in which she, and every other woman, was liable to be placed. Her Belvidera, Isabella, Mrs. Beverley, etc. were all characters of this strictly feminine class of heroines, and she played them to the life. They were made of softness and suffering. We recollect the first time we saw her in Belvidera, when the manner in which she threw herself into the arms of Jaffier, before they part, was as if her heart would have leaped out of her bosom, if she had not done so. It staggered the spectator like a blow. Again, her first meeting with Biron, in Isabella, was no less admirable and impressive. She looked at, she saw, she knew him: her surprise, her joy were painted in her face, and woke every nerve to rapture. She seemed to have perfected all that her art could do. But the sudden alteration of her look and manner, the shuddering and recoil within herself, when she recovers from her surprise, and recollects her situation, married to another,—at once on the verge of ecstacy and perdition,—baffled description, and threw all that she had before done in the shade,—‘like to another morn, risen on mid noon.’ We could mention many other instances, but they are still too fresh in the memory of our readers to make it necessary. It must be confessed, as perhaps the only drawback on Miss O’Neill’s merit, or on the pleasure derived from seeing her, that she sometimes carried the expression of grief, or agony of mind, to a degree of physical horror that could hardly be borne. Her shrieks, in the concluding scenes of some of her parts, were like those of mandrakes, and you stopped your ears against them: her looks were of ‘moody madness, laughing 398wild, amidst severest woe,’ and you turned your eyes from them; for they seemed to sear like the lightening. Her eye-balls rolled in her head: her words rattled in her throat. This was carrying reality too far. The sufferings of the body are no longer proper for dramatic exhibition when they become objects of painful attention in themselves, and are not merely indications of what passes in the mind—comments and interpreters of the moral sense within. The effect was the more ungrateful from the very contrast (as we before hinted) between this lady’s form and delicate complexion, and the violent conflict into which she was thrown. She seemed like the little flower, not the knotted oak, contending with the pitiless storm. There appeared no reason why she should ‘mar that whiter skin of her’s than snow, or monumental alabaster,’ or rend and dishevel, with ruthless hand, those graceful locks, fairer than the opening day. But these were faults arising from pushing truth and nature to an excess, and we should, at present, be glad to see ‘the best virtues’ of others make even an approach to them. Her common style of speaking had a certain mild and equable intonation, not quite free from manner, but in the more impassioned parts, she became proportionably natural, bold, and varied. In comedy, Miss O’Neill did not, in our judgment, excel: her forte was the serious. Had we never seen her play anything but Lady Teazle, we should not have felt the regret at parting with her, which we now do, in common with every lover of genius, and of the genuine drama.

But it is high time that we should turn from the actors we have lost, to those that still remain amongst us.—Among the novelties of the season are, of course, the two Pantomimes, which, lest we should forget them at last, we shall mention in the first place. We cannot say that we exactly relish the taking Don Quixote as the subject of a Pantomime. The knight was battered and bruised enough in his life-time, without undergoing a gratuitous penance at this time of day. With all our good-will to Mr. Grimaldi, we have a greater affection for Sancho Panza, and do not want to see him metamorphosed into anything but himself. Indeed we cannot spoil Don Quixote; but neither need we try to do it.—Jack and the Bean Stalk is the legitimate growth of the Christmas holidays, and the winter Theatres. The wonders of the necromancer are equalled by the surprising arts of the mechanist. The favoured Bean Stalk grows and ascends the skies, as it did to our infant imaginations, and as if it would never have done growing; and Ogres and Ogresses become familiar to our senses, as to our early fears, in the enchanted palace of Drury-lane Theatre. Seeing is sometimes believing. It is worth going to a good Pantomime, if it was for no other reason than to hear the 399children from school laugh at it, till they are ready to split their sides. What we can no longer enjoy, or wonder at ourselves, it is well to take at the rebound, in the reflection of happy faces, and in the echo of joyous mirth. These little real folks are even better than the fantastical beings, and poetic visions, we see upon the stage!

We are sorry we cannot say anything to reverse the judgment passed upon a new comedy, called Gallantry, or Adventures at Madrid, brought out at this Theatre in the beginning of the month. It was a comedy of intrigue; and, in conformity with the idea of this style of invention, was decorated with a wearisome display of Spanish costume, and enriched with an unmeaning catalogue of enamoured Dons, and disdainful or neglected Donnas. The plot was intricate, so as to become unintelligible, mechanical, and improbable. Every contrivance ‘had its brother, and half the story just reflects the other.’ There was a strange and insurmountable coincidence of antithetical blunders and epigrammatic accidents. The author’s invention seemed to run on all fours, to cut out the different compartments of his fable, like the figures in a country-dance, to answer to one another: or he made all his characters turn the tables on one another, without knowing it. Thus, if a lady sends a letter very innocently to the lover of another, her own lover writes a letter to the mistress of his imaginary rival; if an old fellow falls in love with a young lady, this turns out to be his son’s intended bride; and in this manner the game of cross-purposes is easily kept up, and the plot is diversified by the rule of contraries throughout. There was little attempt at wit in this piece (what little there is was flat and shallow, as well as gross), and there was no attempt at interest or sentiment, except in the character of Constantia, which was well played by Mrs. West, but very ill supported by the author. Mr. Barnard was her lover; and we must say that this gentleman spoils any intrigue in which he is engaged, if it soars above a chambermaid. He plays an impudent, self-sufficient valet, with good emphasis and discretion, or can get through an under-steward very well; but he cannot act the hero or look the gentleman. There is a cast of parts, for which Mr. Barnard is really qualified; and we are unwilling to see him taken out of them, both for his sake and our own. The play was altogether ill got up: it indeed called out the strength of the house, but there was either nothing for them to do, or their parts became them as little as their dresses. Mr. Harley, for instance, who is always so lively in himself, and who so often enlivens others, was put to play a villainous grave Spanish Don, who is full of stratagem and deliberate knavery; and he popped, and wriggled, and fidgetted on and off the stage, nodding his airy plumes, and shaking the powdered locks, in which 400he had been bedizened out, like the figure of Pug we have seen at Bartlemy-Fair, or in Hogarth’s picture of the same little chuckling favourite, in Fashion in High Life. The fault was not in Mr. Harley, who always does his best to please, but in the cut of his clothes, and the cast of his part. Russel had no business in the play. He looked like an Alguazil, not like a Madrid gallant. Instead of meddling with the Spanish cavalier, and strutting about with a feather in his hat and a sword by his side, he should be At Home every night of his life, in Jerry Sneak: he is abroad in almost every other character! Munden made nothing of an amorous, superannuated, wheedling old lord: and, making nothing of the part ‘as it was set down for him,’ he tried, now and then, to thrust in a little caricature of his own, and to insinuate a bye-joke to the galleries. Munden’s is not ‘the courtier’s or the lover’s melancholy;’ but a quaint, fantastical, uncouth, irresistible humour of his own, and he must be strangely grouped, or disposed of, on the theatrical canvass, to lose all his effect. Munden is not a sickly, vapid, decayed inamorato, fit to make his approaches to his mistress’s eyebrows, in good set terms, or with cringing manners: he is a sturdy grotesque—a wild exotic, not a faded passion flower. He does not belong to any class, fashionable or vulgar. He is himself alone: and should only personate those extraordinary and marked characters, that Gilray painted, and O’Keeffe drew. Dowton and Knight were pieces of supererogation in the comedy of Gallantry; and Mrs. Harlowe is only happy in those parts which are meant to be unequivocally repulsive. Miss Kelly was neatly tucked up, in a Spanish bodice and petticoat; and had to carry several messages on or off the stage, in which she succeeded. The play languished on to the end of the fifth act, and then died a natural death. The only chance which it had of escaping was from one or two dramatic situations, borrowed from well-known plays, but disfigured and deprived of their effect, that they might pass for new. One of these was, where Mrs. West, as Constantia, retires from her antiquated lover (Munden) on his knees, in the middle of a speech, profuse of sentiments and compliments, and leaves her maid, Mrs. Harlowe, to receive the reversion of his protestations: the old gallant not discovering his mistake, till he is interrupted by the entrance of company. Mrs. Edwin delivered an Epilogue with some spirit, but its appeals to the favour of the audience only bespoke repeated condemnation. After the curtain dropped, Mr. Elliston, who had performed a part in the piece, came forward to announce that it was withdrawn; but, in submitting to the pleasure of the House, he seemed disposed to dispute the soundness of their taste. He said, ‘It was a difficult 401thing to write a good comedy; perhaps a more difficult thing to judge of one.’ Critics as we are, we cannot make up our minds to that opinion. Or we might say in answer, ‘It is an easy thing to write a bad comedy; a more easy thing to judge of one.’^[39] Be that as it may (for we do not wish to be drawn into a literary or metaphysical controversy with the present manager of Drury Lane,) we do not see what it was to the purpose. Does Mr. Elliston mean to infer, that, because it is a difficult thing to judge of a good comedy, he is a better judge than anyone else, or than the great majority of the audience, who had pronounced sentence upon this? Suppose the comedy had succeeded, as completely as it failed, and that a single individual in the pit had got up to say, that he differed from everyone present, and that his uncalled-for opinion was to be put in competition with the voice of the House, would not Mr. Elliston have thought it a great piece of impertinence and presumption? Why then should he commit the same folly himself?

At Covent Garden there have been two new debutants, Mr. Nathan as Henry Bertram, in Guy Mannering, and Miss Wensley as Rosalind. The first was a decided failure. We do not know what Mr. Nathan’s powers of voice or execution in a room may be: but he has evidently not the capacity of sending out a sufficient volume of articulate sound to fill a large theatre: neither is his manner of speaking, nor his action, at all fitted for the stage. Miss Wensley’s Rosalind was well received, and has been repeated. Her face and figure are agreeable; her voice has considerable sweetness and flexibility; and her manner of performing the part itself, was arch, graceful, and lively; though this young lady (who we understand had not appeared before on any stage) was withheld from giving herself up entirely to the character, by a natural and amiable timidity. We heartily wish she may succeed, and have no fear but she will.^[40] Miss Tree has lately made a valuable addition to the musical strength of Covent Garden. She sings delightfully in company with Miss Stephens; and in the Comedy of Errors almost puzzles the town, as she does Antipholis of Syracuse, which to prefer: Magis pares quam similes. She is quite different, both in quality of voice and style of execution, from our old favourite; and it is this difference that completes the charm of their singing. Her tones are as firm, deep, and mellow, as Miss Stephens’s are clear and sweet. Her ear is as true as it is possible to be; and the sustained manner in which she dwells upon 402a note, is as delightful as the airy fluttering grace with which Miss Stephens varies, and sportively plays with it. The singing of the one may be compared perhaps to a continued stream of honeyed sound, while that of the other is like the tremulous bubbles that float and rise above its surface. Or Miss Tree’s singing has the consistency, the lengthened tenuity or breadth of tone, drawn from a well-strung violin, as Miss Stephens’s resembles the light, liquid, echoing accompaniments of the harp or lute. Of both together, it may be said, when they join their efforts in a single composition, that ‘All is grace above, while all is strength below.’ It is a treat to which of late we have been seldom accustomed.

Mr. Kean’s Coriolanus.—Mr. Kean’s acting is not of the patrician order; he is one of the people, and what might be termed a radical performer. He can do all that may become a man ‘of our infirmity,’ ‘to relish all as sharply, passioned as we;’ but he cannot play a God, or one who fancies himself a God, and who is sublime, not in the strength of his own feelings, but in his contempt for those of others, and in his imaginary superiority to them. That is, he cannot play Coriolanus so well as he plays some other characters, or as we have seen it played often. Wherever there was a struggle of feelings, a momentary ebullition of pity, or remorse, or anguish, wherever nature resumed her wonted rights, Mr. Kean was equal to himself, and superior to every one else; but the prevailing characteristics of the part are inordinate self-opinion, and haughty elevation of soul, that aspire above competition or controul, as the tall rock lifts its head above the skies, and is not bent or shattered by the storm, beautiful in its unconquered strength, terrible in its unaltered repose. Mr. Kean, instead of ‘keeping his state,’ instead of remaining fixed and immoveable (for the most part) on his pedestal of pride, seemed impatient of this mock-dignity, this still-life assumption of superiority; burst too often from the trammels of precedent, and the routine of etiquette, which should have confined him; and descended into the common arena of man, to make good his pretensions by the energy with which he contended for them, and to prove the hollowness of his supposed indifference to the opinion of others by the excessive significance and studied variations of the scorn and disgust he expressed for it. The intolerable airs and aristocratical pretensions of which he is the slave, and to which he falls a victim, did not seem legitimate in him, but upstart, turbulent, and vulgar. Thus his haughty answer to the mob who banish him—‘I banish you’—was given with all the virulence of execration, and rage of impotent despair, as if he had to strain every nerve and faculty of soul to shake off the contamination of their hated power over him, instead of being delivered 403with calm, majestic self-possession, as if he remained rooted to the spot, and his least motion, word, or look, must scatter them like chaff or scum from his presence! The most effective scene was that in which he stands for the Consulship, and begs for ‘the most sweet voices’ of the people whom he loathes; and the most ineffective was that in which he is reluctantly reconciled to, and over-come by the entreaties of, his mother. This decisive and affecting interview passed off as if nothing had happened, and was conducted with diplomatic gravity and skill. The casting of the other parts was a climax in bathos. Mr. Gattie was Menenius, the friend of Coriolanus, and Mr. Penley Tullus Aufidius, his mortal foe. Mr. Pope should have played the part. One would think there were processions and ovations enough in this play, as it was acted in John Kemble’s time; but besides these, there were introduced others of the same sort, some of which were lengthened out as if they would reach all the way to the Circus; and there was a sham-fight, of melodramatic effect, in the second scene, in which Mr. Kean had like to have lost his voice. There was throughout a continual din of—

‘Guns, drums, trumpets, blunderbuss, and thunder.’

or what was very like it. In the middle of an important scene, the tinkling of the stage-bell was employed to announce a flourish of trumpets—a thing which even Mr. Glossup would not hear of, whatever the act of parliament might say to enforce such a puppet-show accompaniment. There is very bad management in all this; and yet Mr. Elliston is the manager.

No. III

[March, 1820.

Minor Theatres.—This is a subject on which we shall treat, with satisfaction to ourselves, and, we hope, to the edification of the reader. Indeed, we are not a little vain of the article we propose to write on this occasion; and we feel the pen in our hands flutter its feathered down with more than its usual specific levity, at the thought of the idle, careless career before it. No Theatre-Royal oppresses the imagination, and entombs it in a mausoleum of massy pride; no manager’s pompous pretensions choak up the lively current of our blood: no long-announced performance, big with expectation, comes to nothing, and yet compels us gravely to record its failure, and compose its epitaph. We have here ‘ample scope and verge enough;’ we pick and chuse as we will, light where we please, and stay no longer than we have a mind—saying ‘this I like, that I loath, as one 404picks pears:’—hover over the Surry Theatre; or snatch a grace beyond the reach of art from the Miss Dennett’s at the Adelphi; or take a peep (like the Devil upon Two Sticks) at Mr. Booth at the Cobourg—and one peep is sufficient:—Or stretch our legs and strain our fancies (as a pure voluntary exercise of dramatic faith and charity) as far as Mr. Rae and the East London, where Mrs. Gould (late Miss Burrell), makes fine work with Don Giovanni and the Furies! We are not, in this case, to be ‘constrained by mastery.’—Escaped from under the more immediate inspection of the Lord Chamberlain’s eye, fastidious objections, formal method, regular details, strict moral censure, cannot be expected at our hands: our ‘speculative and officed instruments’ may be well laid aside for a time. At sight of the purlieus of taste, and suburbs of the drama, criticism ‘clappeth his wings, and straitway he is gone!’ In short, we feel it as our bounden duty to strike a truce with gravity, and give a furlough to fancy; and, in entering on this part of our subject, to let our thoughts wander over it, sport and trifle with it at pleasure, like the butter-fly of whom Spenser largely and loftily sings in his Muiopotmos.—

‘There he arriving, round about doth fly

From bed to bed, from one to other border,

And takes survey, with curious busy eye,

Of every flower and herb there set in order;

Now this, now that he tasteth tenderly,

Yet none of them he rudely doth disorder,

Nor with his feet their silken leaves deface,

But pastures on the pleasures of each place.

What more felicity can fall to creature

Than to enjoy Delight with Liberty,

And to be lord of all the works of Nature,

To reign in th’ air from earth to highest sky:

To feed on flowers, and weeds of glorious feature,

To take whatever thing doth please the eye?

Who rests not pleased with such happiness,

Well worthy he to taste of wretchedness!’

If we could but once realise this idea of a butterfly-critic extracting sweets from flowers and turning gall to honey, we might well hope to soar above the Grub-street race, and confound, by the novelty of our appearance, and the gaiety of our flight, the idle conjectures of ignorant or malicious pretenders in entomology!

Besides, having once got out of the vortex of prejudice and fashion, that surrounds our large Winter Theatres, what is there to hinder us (or what shall) from dropping down from the verge of the metropolis 405into the haunts of the provincial drama;—from taking coach to Bath or Brighton, or visiting the Land’s-End, or giving an account of Botany-bay theatricals, or the establishment of a new theatre at Venezuela? One reason that makes the Minor Theatres interesting is, that they are the connecting link, that lets us down, by an easy transition, from the highest pomp and proudest display of the Thespian art, to its first rudiments and helpless infancy.—With conscious happy retrospect, they lead the eye back, along the vista of the imagination, to the village barn, or travelling booth, or old-fashioned town-hall, or more genteel assembly-room, in which Momus first unmasked to us his fairy revels, and introduced us, for the first time in our lives, to that strange anomaly in existence, that fanciful reality, that gay waking dream, a company of strolling players! Sit still, draw close together, hold in your breath—not a word, not a whisper—the laugh is ready to start away, ‘like greyhound on the slip,’ the big tear of wonder and expectation is ready to steal down ‘the full eyes and fair cheeks of childhood,’ almost before the time. Only another moment, and amidst blazing tapers, and the dancing sounds of music, and light throbbing hearts, and eager looks, the curtain rises, and the picture of the world appears before us in all its glory and in all its freshness. Life throws its gaudy shadow across the stage; Hope shakes his many-coloured wings, ‘embalmed with odours;’ Joy claps his hands, and laughs in a hundred happy faces. Oh childish fancy, what a mighty empire is thine; what endless creations thou buildest out of nothing; what ‘a wide O’ indeed, thou chusest to act thy thoughts, and unrivalled feats upon! Thou art better than the gilt trophy that decks the funeral pall of kings; thou art brighter than the costly mace that precedes them on their coronation-day. Thy fearfullest visions are enviable happiness; thy wildest fictions are the solidest truths. Thou art the only reality. All other possessions mock our idle grasp: but thou performest by promising; thy smile is fruition; thy blandishments are all that we can fairly call our own; thou art the balm of life, the heaven of childhood, the poet’s idol, and the player’s pride! The world is but thy painting; and the stage is thine enchanted mirror.—When it first displays its shining surface to our view, how glad, how surprised are we! We have no thought of any deception in the scene, no wish but to realize it ourselves with inconsiderate haste and fond impatience. We say to the air-drawn gorgeous phantom, ‘Come, let me clutch thee!’ A new sense comes upon us, the scales fall off our eyes, and the scenes of life start out in endless quick succession crowded with men and women-actors, such as we see before us—comparable to ‘those gay creatures of the element, that live in the rainbow, and play i’ th’ plighted clouds!’ 406Happy are we who look on and admire; and happy, we think, must they be who are so looked at and admired; and sometimes we begin to feel uneasy till we can ourselves mingle in the gay, busy, talking, fluttering, powdered, painted, perfumed, peruked, quaintly-accoutred throng of coxcombs and coquettes,—of tragedy heroes or heroines,—in good earnest; or turn stage-players and represent them in jest, with all the impertinent and consequential airs of the originals!

It is no insignificant epoch in one’s life the first time that odd-looking thing, a play-bill, is left at our door in a little market-town in the country (say W—m in S——shire). The Manager, somewhat fatter and more erect, ‘as Manager beseems,’ than the rest of his Company, with more of the man of business, and not less of the coxcomb, in his strut and manner, knocks at the door with the end of a walking cane (a badge of office!) and a bundle of papers under his arm; presents one of them printed in large capitals, with a respectful bow and a familiar shrug; hopes to give satisfaction in the town; hints at the liberal encouragement they received at W——ch, the last place they stopped at; had every possible facility afforded by the Magistrates; supped one evening with the Rev. Mr. J——s, a dissenting clergyman, and really a very well-informed, agreeable, sensible man, full of anecdote—no illiberal prejudices against the profession:—then talks of the strength of his company, with a careless mention of his own favourite line—his benefit fixed for an early day, but would do himself the honour to leave farther particulars at a future opportunity—speaks of the stage as an elegant amusement, that most agreeably enlivened a spare evening or two in the week, and, under proper management (to which he himself paid the most assiduous attention) might be made of the greatest assistance to the cause of virtue and humanity—had seen Mr. Garrick act the last night but one before his retiring from the stage—had himself had offers from the London boards, and indeed could not say he had given up all thoughts of one day surprising them—as it was, had no reason to repine—Mrs. F—— tolerably advanced in life—his eldest son a prodigious turn for the higher walks of tragedy—had said perhaps too much of himself—had given universal satisfaction—hoped that the young gentleman and lady, at least, would attend on the following evening, when the West-Indian would be performed at the market-hall, with the farce of No Song No Supper—and so having played his part, withdraws in the full persuasion of having made a favourable impression, and of meeting with every encouragement the place affords! Thus he passes from house to house, and goes through the routine of topic after topic, with that sort of modest assurance, which is indispensable in the manager of a country theatre. 407This fellow, who floats over the troubles of life as the froth above the idle wave, with all his little expedients and disappointments, with pawned paste-buckles, mortgaged scenery, empty exchequer, and rebellious orchestra, is not of all men the most miserable:—he is little less happy than a king, though not much better off than a beggar. He has little to think of, much to do, more to say; and is accompanied, in his incessant daily round of trifling occupations, with a never-failing sense of authority and self-importance, the one thing needful (above all others) to the heart of man. This however is their man of business in the company; he is a sort of fixture in their little state; like Nebuchadnezzar’s image, but half of earth and half of finer metal: he is not ‘of imagination all compact:’ he is not, like the rest of his aspiring crew, a feeder upon air, a drinker of applause, tricked out in vanity and in nothing else; he is not quite mad, nor quite happy. The whining Romeo, who goes supperless to bed, and on his pallet of straw dreams of a crown of laurel, of waving handkerchiefs, of bright eyes, and billet-doux breathing boundless love: the ranting Richard, whose infuriate execrations are drowned in the shouts of the all-ruling pit; he who, without a coat to his back, or a groat in his purse, snatches at Cato’s robe, and binds the diadem of Cæsar on his brow;—these are the men that Fancy has chosen for herself, and placed above the reach of fortune, and almost of fate. They take no thought for the morrow. What is it to them what they shall eat, or what they shall drink, or how they shall be clothed? ‘Their mind to them a kingdom is.’—It is not a poor ten shillings a week, their share in the profits of the theatre, with which they have to pay for bed, board, and lodging, that bounds their wealth. They share (and not unequally) in all the wealth, the pomp, and pleasures of the world. They wield sceptres, conquer kingdoms, court princesses, are clothed in purple, and fare sumptuously every night. They taste, in imagination, ‘of all earth’s bliss, both living and loving:’ whatever has been most the admiration or most the envy of mankind, they, for a moment, in their own eyes, and in the eyes of others, become. The poet fancies others to be this or that; the player fancies himself to be all that the poet but describes. A little rouge makes him a lover, a plume of feathers a hero, a brazen crown an emperor. Where will you buy rank, office, supreme delights, so cheap as at his shop of fancy? Is it nothing to dream whenever we please, and seem whatever we desire? Is real greatness, is real prosperity, more than what it seems? Where shall we find, or where shall the votary of the stage find, Fortunatus’s Wishing Cap, but in the wardrobe which we laugh at: or borrow the philosopher’s stone but from the property-man of the theatre? He has discovered 408the true Elixir of Life, which is freedom from care: he quaffs the pure aurum potabile, which is popular applause. He who is smit with the love of this ideal existence, cannot be weaned from it. Hoot him from the stage, and he will stay to sweep the lobbies or shift the scenes. Offer him twice the salary to go into a counting-house, or stand behind a counter, and he will return to poverty, steeped in contempt, but eked out with fancy, at the end of a week. Make a laughing-stock of an actress, lower her salary, tell her she is too tall, awkward, stupid, and ugly; try to get rid of her all you can—she will remain, only to hear herself courted, to listen to the echo of her borrowed name, to live but one short minute in the lap of vanity and tinsel shew. Will you give a man an additional ten shillings a week, and ask him to resign the fancied wealth of the world, which he ‘by his so potent art’ can conjure up, and glad his eyes, and fill his heart with it? When a little change of dress, and the muttering a few talismanic words, make all the difference between the vagabond and the hero, what signifies the interval so easily passed? Would you not yourself consent to be alternately a beggar and a king, but that you have not the secret skill to be so? The player has that ‘happy alchemy of mind:’—why then would you reduce him to an equality with yourself?—The moral of this reasoning is known and felt, though it may be gainsayed. Wherever the players come, they send a welcome before them, and leave an air in the place behind them.^[41] They shed a light upon the day, that does not very soon pass off. See how they glitter along the street, wandering, not where business but the bent of pleasure takes them, like mealy-coated butterflies, or insects flitting in the sun. They seem another, happier, idler race of mortals, prolonging the carelessness of childhood to old age, floating down the stream of life, or wafted by the wanton breeze to their final place of rest. We remember one (we must make the reader acquainted with him) who once overtook us loitering by ‘Severn’s sedgy side,’ on a fine May morning, with a score of play-bills streaming from his pockets, for the use of the neighbouring villages, and a music-score in his hand, which he sung blithe and clear, advancing with light step and a loud voice! With a sprightly bon jour, he passed on, carolling to the echo of the babbling stream, brisk as a bird, gay as a mote, swift as an arrow from a twanging bow, heart-whole, and with shining face that shot back the sun’s broad rays!—What is become of this favourite of mirth and song? Has care touched him? Has death tripped up his heels? Has an 409indigestion imprisoned him, and all his gaiety, in a living dungeon? Or is he himself lost and buried amidst the rubbish of one of our larger, or else of one of our Minor Theatres?

——‘Alas! how changed from him,

That life of pleasure, and that soul of whim!’

But as this was no doubt the height of his ambition, why should we wish to debar him of it?

This brings us back, after our intended digression, to the subject from whence we set out,—the smaller theatres of the metropolis; which we visited lately, in hopes to find in them a romantic contrast to the presumptuous and exclusive pretensions of the legitimate drama, and to revive some of the associations of our youth above described.—The first attempt we made was at the Cobourg, and we were completely baulked. Judge of our disappointment. This was not owing, we protest, to any fault or perversity of our own; to the crust and scales of formality which had grown over us; to the panoply of criticism in which we go armed, and which made us inaccessible to ‘pleasure’s finest point;’ or to the cheveux-de-fris of objections, which cut us off from all cordial participation in what was going forward on the stage. No such thing. We went not only willing, but determined to be pleased. We had laid aside the pedantry of rules, the petulance of sarcasm, and had hoped to open once more, by stealth, the source of sacred tears, of bubbling laughter, and concealed sighs. We were not formidable. On the contrary, we were ‘made of penetrable stuff.’ Stooping from our pride of place, we were ready to be equally delighted with a clown in a pantomime, or a lord-mayor in a tragedy. We were all attention, simplicity, and enthusiasm. But we saw neither attention, simplicity, nor enthusiasm in any body else; and our whole scheme of voluntary delusion and social enjoyment was cut up by the roots. The play was indifferent, but that was nothing. The acting was bad, but that was nothing. The audience were low, but that was nothing. It was the heartless indifference and hearty contempt shown by the performers for their parts, and by the audience for the players and the play, that disgusted us with all of them. Instead of the rude, naked, undisguised expression of curiosity and wonder, of overflowing vanity and unbridled egotism, there was nothing but an exhibition of the most petulant cockneyism and vulgar slang. All our former notions and theories were turned topsy-turvy. The genius of St. George’s Fields prevailed, and you felt yourself in a bridewell, or a brothel, amidst Jew-boys, pickpockets, prostitutes, and mountebanks, instead of being in the precincts of Mount Parnassus, or in the company of the Muses. 410The object was not to admire or to excel, but to vilify and degrade every thing. The audience did not hiss the actors (that would have implied a serious feeling of disapprobation, and something like a disappointed wish to be pleased) but they laughed, hooted at, nick-named, pelted them with oranges and witticisms, to show their unruly contempt for them and their art; while the performers, to be even with the audience, evidently slurred their parts, as if ashamed to be thought to take any interest in them, laughed in one another’s faces, and in that of their friends in the pit, and most effectually marred the process of theatrical illusion, by turning the whole into a most unprincipled burlesque. We cannot help thinking that some part of this indecency and licentiousness is to be traced to the diminutive size of these theatres, and to the close contact into which these unmannerly censors come with the objects of their ignorant and unfeeling scorn. Familiarity breeds contempt. By too narrow an inspection, you take away that fine, hazy medium of abstraction, by which (in moderation) a play is best set off: you are, as it were, admitted behind the scenes; ‘see the puppets dallying;’ shake hands, across the orchestra, with an actor whom you know, or take one you do not like by the beard, with equal impropriety:—you distinguish the paint, the individual features, the texture of the dresses, the patch-work and machinery by which the whole is made up; and this in some measure destroys the effect, distracts attention, suspends the interest, and makes you disposed to quarrel with the actors as impostors, and ‘not the men you took them for.’ You here see Mr. Booth, in Brutus, with every motion of his face articulated, with his under-jaws grinding out sentences, and his upper-lip twitching at words and syllables, as if a needle and thread had been passed through each corner of it, and the gude wife still continued sewing at her work:—you perceive the contortion and barrenness of his expression (in which there is only one form of bent brows, and close pent-up mouth for all occasions) the parsimony of his figure is exposed, and the refuse tones of his voice fall with undiminished vulgarity on the pained ear:—you have Mr. Higman as Prior Aymer in Ivanhoe, who used to play the Gipsey so well at Covent-garden in Guy Mannering, and who certainly is an admirable bass singer: you have Mr. Stanley, from the Theatre-Royal, Bath, and whom we thought an interesting actor there (such as poor Wilson might have been who trod the same boards, and with whom our readers will remember that Miss Lydia Melford, in Humphrey Clinker, fell in love):—you have Mr. Barrymore, that old and deserving favourite with the public in the best days of Mrs. Siddons and of John Kemble, superintending, we believe, the whole, from a little oval window in a stage-box, like 411Mr. Bentham eying the hopeful circle of delinquents in his Panopticon:—and, to sum up all in one word, you have here Mr. H. Kemble, whose hereditary gravity is put to the last test, by the yells and grins of the remorseless rabble.

‘My soul turn from them!’—‘Turn we to survey’ where the Miss Dennetts, at the Adelphi Theatre, (which should once more from them be called the Sans Pareil) weave the airy, the harmonious, liquid dance. Of each of them it might be said, and we believe has been said—

‘Her, lovely Venus at a birth

With two Sister Graces more

To ivy-crowned Bacchus bore.’

Such figures, no doubt, gave rise to the fables of ancient mythology, and might be worshipped. They revive the ideas of classic grace, life, and joy. They do not seem like taught dancers, Columbines, and figurantes on an artificial stage; but come bounding forward like nymphs in vales of Arcady, or, like Italian shepherdesses, join in a lovely group of easy gracefulness, while ‘vernal airs attune the trembling leaves’ to their soft motions. If they were nothing in themselves, they would be complete in one another. Each owes a double grace, youth, and beauty, to her reflection in the other two. It is the principle of proportion or harmony personified. To deny their merit or criticise their style, is to be blind and dead to the felicities of art and nature. Not to feel the force of their united charms (united, yet divided, different, and yet the same), is not to see the beauty of ‘three red roses on a stalk,’—or of the mingled hues of the rainbow, or of the halcyon’s breast, reflected in the stream,—or ‘the witchery of the soft blue sky,’ or grace in the waving of the branch of a tree, or tenderness in the bending of a flower, or liveliness in the motion of a wave of the sea. We shall not try to defend them against the dancing-school critics; there is another school, different from that of the pied a plomb and pirouette cant, the school of taste and nature. In this school, the Miss Dennetts are (to say the least) delicious novices. Theirs is the only performance on the stage (we include the Opera) that gives the uninitiated spectator an idea that dancing can be an emanation of instinctive gaiety, or express the language of sentiment. We might shew them to the Count Stendhal, who speaks so feelingly of the beauties of a dance by Italian peasant girls, as our three English Graces; and we might add, as a farther proof of national liberality and public taste, that they had been discarded from one of our larger, to take refuge in one of our petty theatres, on a disagreement about a pound a week in their joint 412salaries. Yet we suppose if these young ladies were to marry, and not volunteer to put ten thousand pounds in the pockets of some liberally disposed manager, we should hear a very pitiful story of their ingratitude to their patrons and the public. It is the way of the world. There is a Mr. Reeve at this theatre (the Adelphi in the Strand) of whom report had spoken highly in his particular department as a mimic, and in whom we were considerably disappointed. He is not so good as Matthews, who, after all, is by no means a fac-simile of those he pretends to represent. We knew most of Mr. Reeve’s likenesses, and that is the utmost we can say in their praise; for we thought them very bad ones. They were very slight, and yet contrived to be very disagreeable. Farren was the most amusing, from a certain oddity of voice and manner in the ingenious and eccentric original. Harley, again, was not at all the thing. There was something of the external dress and deportment, but none of the spirit, the frothy essence. He made him out a great burly swaggering ruffian, instead of being what he is—a pleasant, fidgetty person, pert as a jack-daw, light as a grasshopper. In short, from having seen Mr. Reeve, no one would wish to see Mr. Harley, though there is no one who has seen him but wishes to see him again; and, though mimicry has the privilege of turning into ridicule the loftier pretensions of tragic heroes, we believe it always endeavours to set off the livelier peculiarities of comic ones in the most agreeable light. Mr. Kean was bad enough. It might have been coarse and repulsive enough, and yet like; but it wanted point and energy, and this was inexcusable. We have heard much of ludicrous and admirable imitations of Mr. Kean’s acting. But the only person who ever caricatures Mr. Kean well, or from whose exaggerations he has any thing to fear, is himself. There are several other actors at the Adelphi who are, and must continue to be, nameless. There are also some better known to the town, as Mr. Wilkinson, Mrs. Alsop, etc. This lady has lost none of her exuberant and piquant vivacity by her change of situation. She also looks much the same: and as you see her near, this circumstance is by no means to her advantage. The truth is, that there are not good actors or agreeable actresses enough in town to make one really good company (by which we mean a company able to get up any one really good play throughout) and of course there are not a sufficient number (unless by a miracle) to divide into eight or ten different establishments.

Of the Haymarket and Lyceum, which come more properly under the head of Summer Theatres, it is not at present ‘our hint to speak’; but we may shortly take a peep into the Surrey and East London 413Theatres,^[42] and enlarge upon them as we see cause. Of the latter it is sufficient to observe, that Mr. Rae is the principal tragic actor there, and Mr. Peter Moore the chief manager. After this, is it to be wondered at that Covent-garden is almost deserted, and that Mr. Elliston cannot yet afford to give up the practice of puffing at the bottom of his play-bills!

The larger, as well as the smaller, theatres have been closed during the greater part of the last month. There has been one new piece, the Antiquary, brought out at Covent-garden, since our last report. It is founded, as our readers will suppose, on the admirable novel of that name by the author of Waverley, but it is only a slight sketch of the story and characters, and not, we think, equal to the former popular melo-drames taken from the same prolific source. The characters in general were not very intelligibly brought out, nor very strikingly cast. Liston made but an indifferent Mr. Jonathan Oldbuck. He was dressed in a snuff-coloured coat and plain bob-wig, and that was all. It was quaint and dry, and accordingly inefficient, and quite unlike his admirable portrait of Dominie Sampson, which is one of the finest pieces of acting on the stage, both for humour and feeling, invention and expression. The little odd ways and antiquarian whims and crochets of Mr. Oldbuck, even were they as well managed in the drama as they are exquisitely hit off in the novel, would hardly tell in Liston’s hands. Emery made an impressive Edie Ochiltree; but he was somewhat too powerful a preacher, and too sturdy a beggar. Mr. Abbott personated the haughty, petulant Captain MacIntire to a great nicety of resemblance. Mr. Duruset as young Lovell ‘warbled’ in a manner that Jacques would not have found fault with. Miss Stephens sang one or two airs very sweetly, and was complimented at the end very rapturously and unexpectedly by the ungallant Mr. Oldbuck. The scene on the sea-shore, where she is in danger of being overtaken by the tide, with her father and old Edie, had an admirable effect, as far as the imitation of the rolling of the waves of the sea on a London stage could produce admiration. The part of old Elspith of Craigie Burn Wood was strikingly performed by Mrs. Fawcett, who, indeed, acts whatever she undertakes well; and the scene with Lord Glenallan, in which she unfolds to 414him the dreadful story of his life, was given at much length and with considerable effect. But what can come up to the sublime, heartbreaking pathos, the terrific painting of the original work? The story of this unhappy feudal lord is the most harrowing in all these novels (rich as they are in the materials of nature and passion): and the description of the old woman, who had been a principal subordinate instrument in the tragedy, is done with a more masterly and withering hand than any other. Her death-like appearance, her strange existence, like one hovering between this world and the next, or like a speaking corpse; her fixed attitude, her complete forgetfulness of every thing but the one subject that loads her thoughts, her preternatural self-possession on that, her prophetic and awful denunciations, her clay-cold and shrivelled body, consumed and kept alive by a wasting fire within, are all given with a subtlety, a truth, a boldness and originality of conception, that were never, perhaps, surpassed. But the author does not want our praise; nor can we withhold from him our admiration.

Mr. Kean, the week before we saw him in Coriolanus, played Othello; and as we would always prefer bearing testimony to his genius, to recording his comparative failures, we will here express our opinion of his performance of this character in the words of a contemporary journal, a short time back:—

Mr. Kean’s Othello is, we suppose, the finest piece of acting in the world. It is impossible either to describe or praise it adequately. We have never seen any actor so wrought upon, so ‘perplexed in the extreme.’ The energy of passion, as it expresses itself in action, is not the most terrific part: it is the agony of his soul, showing itself in looks and tones of voice. In one part, where he listens in dumb despair to the fiend-like insinuations of Iago, he presented the very face, the marble aspect of Dante’s Count Ugolino. On his fixed eye-lids, ‘horror sat plumed.’ In another part, where a gleam of hope or of tenderness returns to subdue the tumult of his passions, his voice broke in faltering accents from his over-charged breast. His lips might be said less to utter words, than to distil drops of blood, gushing from his heart. An instance of this was in his pronunciation of the line, ‘of one that loved not wisely but too well.’ The whole of this last speech was indeed given with exquisite force and beauty. We only object to the virulence with which he delivers the last line, and with which he stabs himself—a virulence which Othello would neither feel against himself at the moment, nor against the ‘turbaned Turk’ (whom he had slain) at such a distance at time. His exclamation on seeing his wife, ‘I cannot think but Desdemona’s honest,’ was, ‘the glorious triumph of exceeding love’; a thought flashing conviction on his mind, and irradiating his countenance with joy, like sudden sunshine. In fact, almost every scene or sentence in this extraordinary exhibition is a master-piece of natural passion. The convulsed motion of the hands, and the involuntary swelling 415of the veins in the forehead in some of the most painful situations, should not only suggest topics of critical panegyric, but might furnish studies to the painter or anatomist.

No. IV

[April, 1820.

The age we live in is critical, didactic, paradoxical, romantic, but it is not dramatic. This, if any, is its weak side: it is there that modern literature does not run on all fours, nor triumph over the periods that are past; it halts on one leg; and is fairly distanced by long-acknowledged excellence, as well as by long-forgotten efforts of the same kind. Our ancestors could write a tragedy two hundred years ago; they could write a comedy one hundred years ago; why cannot we do the same now? It is hard to say; but so it is. When we give it as our opinion, that this is not ‘the high and palmy state’ of the productions of the stage, we would be understood to signify, that there has hardly been a good tragedy or a good comedy written within the last fifty years, that is, since the time of Home’s Douglas, and Sheridan’s School for Scandal; and when we speak of a good tragedy or comedy, we mean one that will be thought so fifty years hence. Not that we would have it supposed, that a work, to be worth any thing, must last always: what we have said above of works that have fallen into unmerited decay, through the lapse of time, and mutation of circumstances, would show the contrary: but we think that a play that only runs its one-and-twenty nights, that does not reach beyond the life of an actor, or the fashion of a single generation, may be fairly set down as good for nothing, to any purposes of criticism, or serious admiration. Time seems to have its circle as well as the globe we inhabit; the loftiest eminences, by degrees, sink beneath the horizon; the greatest works are lost sight of in the end, and cannot be restored; but those that disappear at the first step we take, or are hidden by the first object that intervenes, can, in either case, be of no real magnitude or importance. We have never seen the highest range of mountains in the world; nor are the longest-lived works intelligible to us (from the difference both of language and manners) at this day: but the name of the Andes, like that of old, blind Homer, serves us on this side of the globe, and at the lag-end of time, to repeat and wonder at; and that we have ever heard of either is alone sufficient proof of the vastness of the one, and of the sublimity of the other! Without waiting for the final award, or gradual oblivion of slow-revolving ages, we may be bold to say of our writers for the stage, during the last twenty or thirty years, as 416Pope is reported to have said of Ben Jonson’s, somewhat unadvisedly, ‘What trash are their works, taken altogether!’ We would not deny or depreciate merit, wherever we find it, in individuals, or in classes: for instance, we grant that all the pantomimes are good in which Mr. Grimaldi plays the clown; and that the melodrames have been excellent, when Mr. Farley had a hand in them; and that the farces could not be damned if Munden showed his face in them; and that O’Keeffe’s could not fail with an audience that had a mind to laugh: but having mentioned these, and added a few more to our private list (for it might be invidious to specify particularly No Song no Supper, the Prize, Goldfinch, Robert Tyke, or Lubin Log, &c. &c.), we really are at a loss to proceed with the more legitimate and higher productions of the modern drama. Are there not then Mr. Coleridge’s Remorse, Mr. Maturin’s Bertram, Mr. Milman’s Fazio, and many others? There are; but we do not know that they make any difference in the question. The poverty indeed of our present dramatic genius cannot be made appear more fully than by this, that whatever it has to show of profound, is of German taste and origin; and that what little it can boast of elegant, though light and vain, is taken from petite pieces of Parisian mould.