every review and magazine, which takes any sort of cognizance of theatrical amusements. Their private boxes, too, were few-what there was showed itself fairly as audience. Upon great occasions seven or eight rows of the pit were laid into the boxes, and then the old Drury exhibited, two months before it closed, 412/., as the total taken at the door for the first benefit of Mrs. Siddons after her return. London, however, was rapidly increasing, and it was conceived that larger theatres were demanded. All the articles of consumption, too, were upon the rise; among these were the salaries of performers; and the patentees thought that they needed not only more spectators, but greater prices. Both of these objects, they now determined to carry, on what they thought sure, because reasonable grounds. We may leave them for the present to mature their plan, while we turn to the theatre which should always be called Colman's, if the little theatre, in the changes of public taste, be not thought the more attractive appellation.

The late Earl of Guilford, whom I had once the honour to call my friend, whose conviviality and pleasantry endeared the name of Frank North, wherever it was heard, had written, like Colman, a play upon old English manners, which he called the Kentish Barons, and on the 25th of June it was acted for the first time at the summer theatre. There was occasionally a vein of genuine poetry in the dialogue; but the incident was one of pure invention, but little probable; and his antiquarian zeal had run costume much beyond convenience. They who amuse themselves with Strutt's collections, or glean from the useful chapters with which Dr. Henry enriched his History of England, may have learned, that there was a time when our beaux wore enormous pikes to their boots or shoes; and that these were chained to the knees of the wearer; so as to exhibit a man, at perfect liberty, walking in fetters. The author's punctilious exactness, excited a smile, and perhaps to see the solemn Bensley skating through a scene in these cumbrous appendages was rather a severe tax upon gravity—

"For RIGHT, too rigid, hardens into wrong."

Mr. Kemble himself carried the attention to costume far, but as far only as he found grace; there he stopt. Exactness might load these pikes upon the shoes with portable mirrors, and looking downward be once more an argument of self-love instead of confusion.

Nn

Mrs. Inchbald, pursuing her course of French literature, now produced her very entertaining comedy called Next Door Neighbours; and in conformity with her title, she took, as a sort of cause and effect, two French pieces to work upon, Le Dissipateur and L'Indigent. These she treated with that skill which she had now acquired, and the theatre was certainly indebted to her facility.

Mrs. Jordan kindly came this season to act for Mrs. Bannister's benefit. Every body was disposed to assist a lady whom all respected and admired. In the mean time, Colman was in rehearsal with a second old English play, which took off some of the lavish raw material, that had dressed the Kentish Barons; and from its popularity wore out its habiliments--I allude to the Surrender of Calais, another of those happy imitations, which, however close, are not servile, and seem to resemble Shakspeare, as a sport, rather than a necessity. How far our great dramatic poet looked at the state of his company, while writing his play, I cannot determine he seems to have been governed, as to characters, solely by his fable. The summer manager always appeared to write for his green-room, and to value himself upon exactly fitting his actors with proper vehicles for their talents. What he did in this way for Bannister, was really an achievement; but the interest about him, and the unsophisticated nature of his acting, made him one of the surest cards that any manager could play with.

Bensley, in the grand tirade before Edward, as Eustache de St. Pierre, became absolutely sublime, from the virtuous energy, that seemed to dilate his person, and thunder from his sonorous organ. It really was a display not to be forgotten. The play, commencing the 30th of July, was acted 28 times in the brief remainder of the summer season.

As an amusing instance how hints may be taken, in the grave scene in Hamlet, one delver asks the other, "Who builds stronger than the mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter?" The answer is, "The gallows maker, for that frame outlives a thousand tenants:" on this hint, Colman constructed a brace of these frame-makers; and sent on Parsons to "pluck out the heart of their mystery." The scene, like its original, was a favourite always; and Colman defied, though Garrick did not, the criticism of Voltaire, and all the Laharpes and Chateaubriants he had left behind him. The author Zaïre found no great difficulty in overthrowing the feeble fences that Horace Walpole set up against him, when he advanced to insult, rather than attack the territory of Shak

speare-but the race of French critics seem to have slunk away from the preface of Johnson; where, indeed, the seal is put upon all the flimsy pretences of that vain people of critical legislators: I say people of critics, for they ALL detail the same arguments, and there is little difference in their force between the Abbé and the Shopkeeper.

CHAP. V.

Vinter season of 1791-2.-Mr. Fawcett at Covent Garden. —Mr. Charles Kemble.—Drury Lane removed to the Haymarket.-New prices.-Prelude.-Oscar and Malvina, by Byrne.-Reynolds's notoriety.—Mrs. Billington.-Ryder dies.-Day in Turkey.-Lady Mary Wortley Montague.Warburton's singularity as to her letters.-Mrs. Jordan.Public opinion.-Her apology.-Mr. Kemble's difficulties. --Cymon revived.-Huniades.-Mrs. Siddons acts Q. Elizabeth in Richard III.—Mr. Kemble forced into a duel by Mr. J. Aickin.-Road to Ruin.-Richardson's Comedy of the Fugitive.-Jealous Wife.-Mr. Kemble and Mrs. Siddons.-Drury Italianized.-P. Hoare's Dido.-Little Theatre.-Mrs. Whitelock.-Mrs. Sheridan's death.-Mrs. Bannister retires.

THE winter season of 1791-2 was opened by Covent Garden with the Dramatist, in which Mrs. Merry, formerly Miss Brunton, acted for the first time since her marriage. To have yielded to the ardour and accomplishments of Merry could be a matter of no surprise to any person who had enjoyed his society. Bating his tendency to play, which was a fever in him that nothing could render intermittent, he was one of the most original and captivating men whom I have ever known. But unhappily for himself and his former associates, he now became perfectly rabid with the French revolution; associated himself with the radical press, and spoke its furious and disgusting language; by degrees he detached himself from men who could not echo, and disdained to humour him; and though complexionally indolent, his political passion lashed him into a daily ridicule of all that ages have respected, and he became one of the eyes of Argus (a newspaper so named,) and amused himself with what he called "common stuff" and "stars and strings." Over this transformation even the muse possessed no power; and the poet and the gentleman vanished together.

The 21st of September brought upon the boards of Covent Garden Theatre Mr. Fawcett, the younger, from the York company. He made his entré in Caleb, in He would be a Soldier, a part of great nonsense and rattle, in which a man

of Fawcett's sound common sense descends to amuse valgarity; conscious at the same time that he possesses powers of higher value; which, without any great refinement, interest deeply, and urge the moral lesson home to the heart. There is in this actor, whenever the opportunity is given, as great a command over the tender affections as can be displayed in characters of middle life. I have a pleasure in thus detaching his real excellencies from a crowd of buffooneries, which he always seems to disdain while he exhibits them; and for which there are beings naturally gifted.

Mr. Kemble, during the summer, had been greatly alarmed by the very serious illness of his brother Charles, then a youth of fifteen, whom he had placed, three years before, at the College of Douay, in order to his obtaining all those advantages which he had himself formerly derived. The reported attainments of his brother gave him the highest satisfaction. But on this journey he expected to find him in a very dangerous state of health. He had, however, happily recovered; and, under the care of a friend, was proceeding on his way to England. They met upon the road.

Mr. Kemble was sitting alone in his carriage, reading, as the other carriage advanced in the opposite direction, he raised his eyes from the book, and exclaimed, "Charles!" The meeting was quite theatrical; for, though neither Henry the Eighth nor Francis the First, yet certainly one day the Wolsey and Cromwell of the drama, like the monarchs just named,

"Those two lights of men Met in the vale of Arde;"

and probably in their embraces, as much exceeded the kings in sincere affection, as the latter in splendour surpassed every previous exhibition of royal fraternity. Mr. Kemble was never an "inquisitive traveller;" he wanted only to see his brother; he now saw him quite restored, and they returned to this country in company.

Upon his arrival, Mr. Charles Kemble, for a short time, accepted a situation in the Post Office, and he was removed from one position in it to another; but the foreign department proving no more to his taste than the inland, with the tendency of all his family, he resolved to try his fortune on the stage. He soon, therefore, quitted Lombard street, to make that experiment, which, after a year's rustication, sent him. to the metropolis: a result which has so gratified the public, and, I can fairly add, done honour to the profession.

The removal of the Drury Lane company to a theatre so