Note 143 — Chapter XVII

I think it right to place on record here Leigh Hunt's own allusion to the incident (Autobiography, p. 432), though it will be thought to have too favourable a tone, and I could have wished that other names had also found mention in it. But I have already (p. 211) stated quite unaffectedly my own opinion of the very modest pretensions of the whole affair, and these kind words of Hunt may stand valeant quantum. "Simultaneous with the latest movement about the pension was one on the part of my admirable friend Dickens and other distinguished men, Forsters and Jerrolds, who, combining kindly purpose with an amateur inclination for the stage, had condescended to show to the public what excellent actors they could have been, had they so pleased,—what excellent actors, indeed, some of them were. . . . They proposed . . . a benefit for myself, . . . and the piece performed on the occasion was Ben Jonson's Every Man in his Humour. . . . If anything had been needed to show how men of letters include actors, on the common principle of the greater including the less, these gentlemen would have furnished it. Mr. Dickens's Bobadil had a spirit in it of intellectual apprehension beyond anything the existing stage has shown . . . and Mr. Forster delivered the verses of Ben Jonson with a musical flow and a sense of their grace and beauty unknown, I believe, to the recitation of actors at present. At least I have never heard anything like it since Edmund Kean's." . . . To this may be added some lines from Lord Lytton's prologue spoken at Liverpool, of which I have not been able to find a copy, if indeed it was printed at the time; but the verses come so suddenly and completely back to me, as I am writing after twenty-five years, that in a small way they recall a more interesting effort of memory told me once by Macready. On a Christmas night at Drury Lane there came a necessity to put up the Gamester, which he had not played since he was a youth in his father's theatre thirty years before. He went to rehearsal shrinking from the long and heavy study he should have to undergo, when, with the utterance of the opening sentence, the entire words of the part came back, including even a letter which Beverly has to read, and which it is the property-man's business to supply. My lines come back as unexpectedly; but with pleasanter music than any in Mr. Moore's dreary tragedy, as a few will show.

"Mild amid foes, within a prison free, He comes . . . our grey-hair'd bard of Rimini! Comes with the pomp of memories in his train, Pathos and wit, sweet pleasure and sweet pain! Comes with familiar smile and cordial tone, Our hearths' wise cheerer!—Let us cheer his own! Song links her children with a golden thread, To aid the living bard strides forth the dead. Hark the frank music of the elder age— Ben Jonson's giant tread sounds ringing up the stage! Hail! the large shapes our fathers loved! again Wellbred's light ease, and Kitely's jealous pain. Cob shall have sense, and Stephen be polite, Brainworm shall preach, and Bobadil shall fight— Each, here, a merit not his own shall find, And Every Man the Humour to be kind."