trial. But the 3007. down was an extraordinary oversight; because the whole of that sum was lost, and all that had been laid out in scenery and decorations. The play, bad as it was, turned out the only source of profit to the Irelands. The BOOK was detected before it could be subscribed off or sold; and many reams of most magnificent paper hung as a heavy debt over the head of the editor. I incline to think that, had the illegible MSS. been kept, at all events, longer from the press, and been rendered the mere heralds of the plays, suspicion, it is true, could not have been banished; but discovery would have been averted or delayed. The plays, under the notion of curtailment (always necessary to Shakspeare it seems,) might have been purified sufficiently for success; our enthusiasm would soon have heightened to the wonderful any tolerable passages they might contain; and, at the PRESENT HOUR, Some people might have thought it possible for Shakspeare to have written Vortigern! In the mean time, money, for either benefit nights or copyright, would have poured in upon the projectors of the scheme: but, when once the book exhibited the autographs to the world in general, the whole business was demonstrated to be a forgery. The MUSEUM had shown, that Lord Southampton, the patron of the poet, if he wrote at all to Shakspeare, communicated not only in legible, but elegant, penmanship. The signature of that nobleman never varied; and the handwriting is in every turn confirmed by the copy of Sidney's Arcadia, in my library (the folio, 1593); on the title page of which he has inscribed his name. IRELAND, not being able to tell how his Lordship signed himself, took his own left hand into use for the occasion, and made him scrawl his benevolence to the poet in characters that disgraced it. I shall leave this short chapter of IMPOSITION "unmixed with baser matter," for a reason that seldom occurs; namely, that, at least in literary subjects, none baser will easily be found. "Such then, said Una, as she seemeth here, Thus when they had the witch disrobed quight, They let her goe at will, and wander waies unknowne." Faerie Queene, b. 1. c. viii. s. 49. CHAP. X. Consequences of the failure to Mr. Kemble.-Miss Lee's Almeyda.-Mahmoud.-Kirk's Cruelties.-Mr. Bensley retires from the Stage.-Mrs. Kemble also.--Colman's-Elliston.-Acts Octavian.-Preparatory to Sir Edward Mortimer.--Preface to the Iron Chest.--Death of Dodd.No true successor to him.-Lamash.-Difficulties in Drury. -Mr. Kemble throws up the Management.-Mr. Pitt, a Glance at him.-Elliston at Covent Garden.-Mademoiselle Parissot.-Doruton.-Thomson's Edward and Eleonora.-Alcestis. -Fortune's Fool.-Jephson.-Holman.--Holcroft. --Force of Ridicule.-Miss Farren.-Arnold.--Cure for the Heart Ache.-Mrs. Pope's death.-Garrick and that Actress.--Miss Farren's marriage.-Reynolds goes to Drury Lane.-Garrick's Monument. SHAKSPEARE being now left to his legitimate honours; and the indifference or bad taste of the proprietors of Drury Lane having received not only a check, but an exposure, a good deal of irritation remained, and the ratification of Mr. Kemble's sentence by the public, however agreeable to himself, could not be expected to be palatable to those who had infringed upon his province to the detriment of their property! The elder Ireland, too, kept up a constant battery against Kemble, as having by his conduct injured his employers equally with the author of the play, by which one convenient moral principle is established; THAT a stage manager owes nothing to the public, to Shakspeare, to truth, to honour: he is a man bound to fetter his understanding; to lend a lie the confidence of truth, and swallow his own disgrace; although he has been as confident all along of the imposition, as he was of his own remonstrance. It was unfortunate, too, that the management was not prepared with any tragedy, that promised very brilliant success: the spurious was bad, and the genuine not good. Miss Lee, a lady of considerable talent, turned perhaps rather to romance than tragedy, had long been known to Mrs. Siddons, who accepted the character of Almeyda, in her tragedy so called. The principal male character, Alonzo, was acted by Mr. Kemble. This was a poetical and busy play, but it lived only four nights, and it is therefore useless to go into its fable. The opera of Mahmoud, by Prince Hoare, had been the last work of magnitude undertaken by Stephen Storace; and, as the piece had been powerfully written, Mr. Kemble acted the hero in his happiest style; and the opera succeeded to the full wishes of its modest author, who presented his profits to the widow of his friend, the composer. The elder son of the sultan being supported by our great tragedian, the younger was sustained by Mr. Braham, who thus commenced his exertions upon the stage of a theatre royal, to which he was destined to impart a perfection of musical science and execution hitherto unconnected with our opera, and to which eight-and-twenty years have never offered the shadow of a rival. Mr. Hoare was now so popular, that a tragedy formerly composed by him upon the subject of Kirk's cruelties. and called Such Things Were, was acted on the stage of Drury Lane for Mrs. Siddons's benefit, on the 2d of May, two days after the appearance of his opera. As to his farces, they were constantly before the public. The 6th of May, 1796, witnessed the last performance of Mr. Bensley on the English stage. He acted Evander in the Grecian Daughter, and embraced an Euphrasia worthy of him in the person of Mrs. Siddons. I have not, I hope, slighted the peculiar talents of this very accomplished gentleman, whose retirement added no few parts to the range of Mr. Kemble's performances: he could now, if he chose, relinquish Jaffier for Pierre, and Othello occasionally for Iago; but where, then, could be found an equal substitute for the conspirator and the moor? Wroughton did not quite rise to heroic tragedy; and Palmer, except in a few tragedies, hardly seemed to be in carnest. Barrymore was not above second rate; and Charles Kemble yet young and almost untried. Bensley was therefore a serious loss in the current business; besides the respectability that his name, his literature, and his connexions conferred upon any theatrical community. A retirement of an honourable kind was provided for him, the appointment of Barrack-master, at Knightsbridge; Mr. Bensley having originally served in the army. There was yet another retirement this season from the same theatre. Mrs. Kemble had sustained a line of business on the stage, of a very interesting though not a striking kind. The reader will understand the cast by one instance, Maria, in the School for Scandal. Her comedy, though sprightly and sensible, had never any great force; and she had not in Mr. creased her voice with the dimensions of the theatre. Kemble now determined that she should quit the profession; and on the 23d of May, she attempted to take her leave. The task of talking forty verses to an audience would perhaps have been painful to her at any time; but connected with her present feelings, she could hardly articulate what her friend Greatheed had written for the occasion. Mr. Kemble came forward to receive her; and taking her hand, expressed, in his most gracious manner, his own sensibility for that constant kindness of the audience, which had attended her on that spot at all events, from her infancy. The little theatre this summer was considerably strengthened; both the Palmers were engaged; and Elliston from the Bath Theatre, made his first appearance in Octavian on the 25th of June. It was, in substance, the Octavian of Kemble, some of the subtler spirit flown off; and the partial loss of what was poetical and picturesque compensated, as far as such wants admit of compensation, by the ardour of youth and a voice of very unusual power; manly beyond the age and figure of the actor. No young man in my experience ever exhibited higher promise: but Elliston at the very first was as high in the art as he could reach. I remember that Mr. Kemble expressed himself pleased at the performance, while at the same time he pointed out some passages, where the young artist was, what he used to call abroad”: but the audience were enthusiastic in their reception of Mr. Elliston; and it is yet a subject of astonishment, how he could allow tragedy to slip away from him. In the farce of My Grandmother, he acted Vapour on the night of his Octavian: such very opposite pretensions rarely preserve any balance. GARRICK, HENDERSON, alone in our times, left it doubtful to which muse they most inclined. It has been unfortunately my,province to notice of late too many failures of established authors. The Alfred, or, as according better with the author, the magic banner of O'Keefe, was no more endurable than the other attempts to exhibit the great King upon the stage-and the Don Pedro, or Diabolo of Cumberland, merely afforded a noisy blusterer to John Palmer, of little benefit to the theatre. In short, the manager's season was, as usual, to depend upon himself, and on the 29th of August, the great attempt was made to render the Iron Chest popular, and, what followed of course, profitable to the author. Elliston was destined to Sir Edward Mortimer, and the piece, except as to curtailment, was unaltered. I have, upon the original production of the play, sufficiently spoken my own sentiments: and shall here therefore record the opinions of some attentive observers, who, glad that the experiment succeeded at the Haymarket, saw grounds enough why equal favour might be missed at another theatre. It first then struck them, that no paring down could render the play otherwise than heavy, nor its interest of a kind calculated to give the proper enjoyment of tragedy; that the composition was more than barely turgid, particularly in the ravings of Sir Edward. By the just influence of the manager over his company, and timing the scenes with proper attention at the rehearsals, he had excited less languor, and No disgust in his audience; but it was applauded only where the actor laboured for applause; and two or three violent explosions of Elliston were alone commended or remembered. It was, in fact, still a failure; from the unfortunate choice of a subject, the offspring of POLITICAL SPLEEN, and exhibiting a character that, in either manly or gentlemanly nature, never did exist, to disgrace our species. They said of his singular preface, that, if it added to his reputation as a writer, it took away much from his usual distinctions of candour and temper. They reminded him, that disapprobation had been expressed at Drury Lane before the entrance of Mr. Kemble; and that he had himself admitted the want of curtailment; and left it only as a duty of implication upon those, who conceive they should insult a man of genius, by pretending thus to condemn what had been written with full knowledge and long experience of the stage. On the 12th of September, Mr. Harris opened his theatre for the winter season. The reader has been, no doubt, astonished, with the writer, at the hurry and ignorance, and confidence of architects; the new editions of their works, with corrections and additions, which came out every season. There is a literature of the day, and an architecture : "You laid out twenty thousand pounds before; Its grand The entrances of the house were now altered. saloon," a name without a thing," among ourselves, was converted into a coffee-room: what once held the celebrated Beefsteak Club was to produce comfort of a thinner kind, and afford space to the loungers in the lobbies: "Of the camelion's dish I eat,--the A18." Seven rows of seats were added to the eleven of the centre boxes of the second and third tiers, which would merely admit |