to the affluence of the poet, rather than wish him brought down to the penury of our ideas. The crowded thoughts and splendid diction of Shakespeare must not, for vulgar apprehension, be lowered into the homely chat of Heywood.

CHAPTER XII

THE management of Drury Lane Theatre, in allowing Mrs. Siddons an extra night in the month of March 1783, had, in fact, given but little out of their own funds, though, from the great extent of her fashionable connection, they put the actress in the receipt of a large accession to her established salary. On this night seven rows of the pit were laid into the boxes, and her book, as it lay open in the lobby, was literally the Court Guide.

That benefit produced to Mrs. Siddons no less a sum than £650, but then Lady Spencer gave 90 guineas for her side box, and Lady Aylesbury a bank-note of £50 for an upper box.

A desire to preserve all reasonable continuity in this narrative has compelled me to omit, in the series of dramatic events, some that claim this supplemental record. On the 14th of January expired a very prominent character, the delight of former times, whose cognomen was the sign of merriment and the prelude of harmony. The reader, to be sure, anticipates the person of Old Cervetto, who, at the age of one hundred and two, resigned all the noisy honours of his nose. He played the double bass in the band for many years, and was the father of the great violoncello player. He came to England in the year of the hard frost, and was then an old man. I am afraid his successors in the orchestra have been but slightly accomplished to succeed him; but under the original call for Nosy, or Nozée, his fame yet survives, though that of the trunkmaker excites no longer noise among us.

Mr. Cumberland has a has a name in the drama which demands attention to every effort not very much below

himself.

The Mysterious Husband, acted at Covent Garden on the 28th of January, is in many respects one of his best productions. Before the play went into rehearsal, he brought it to Henderson's house to read it to him. Mrs. Henderson, with a very natural feeling, exclaimed to him: 'Well, Mr. Cumberland, I hope at last you will allow Mr. Henderson to be good for something on the stage.' 'Madam,' replied the poet, 'I can't afford it—a villain he must be.' And, to be sure, of all the causeless depravity in the great moral massacre of the English tragedy, the character of Lord Davenant, in the present play, affords the completest specimen. It seems to have been suggested by Lord Orford's Mysterious Mother, which had been printed in 1768 at Strawberry Hill, and presented to his friends, with the express stipulation that neither Garrick nor Dr. Johnson should be permitted to read it. The Doctor would call this a very angry, but unnecessary prohibition.' It would severely mortify Mr. Garrick, who, however idly, hoped for universal esteem.

I do not wonder that Walpole, when, in 1781, he consented to a publication of this play from his own copy, pronounced a subject so horrid unsuited to the stage; and it should be remembered that, in horrors, The Mysterious Mother greatly transcends either Phædra or Jocasta. But the nervous dignity of its composition will for ever delight in the closet. Yet, when we have in the mind's eye such an actress as Mrs. Siddons, it is impossible to read some of its passages without attempting to conceive the astonishing effect they must receive from her look and utterance. The fifth scene of the first act, where an artful friar is endeavouring to worm out the cause of her remorse that he may be master of her wealth, offers a few points that are irresistible, among many that are fine.

'Bened.

The Church could seal
Your pardon, but you scorn it. In your pride
Consists your danger. Yours are pagan virtues.
Countess. Father, my crimes are pagan: my belief
Too orthodox to trust to erring man.'

When the reader who has known this magician in her strength has a little considered the effect of one word in

this reply, he may be disposed to go on with her in a speech so calculated for her powers—

'What! shall I, foul with guilt, and self-condemn'd,
Presume to kneel where angels kneel appall'd,
And plead a priest's certificate for pardon?
While he, perchance, before my blasted eyes
Shall sink to woes endless, unutterable,
For having fool'd me into that presumption.
Is he to blame, trusting to what he grants?
Countess. Am I to blame, not trusting what he grants?'

Bened.

Nor is the power of the poet at all weakened to the very end of the first act; where, with some of the forms and more of the spirit, he adopts the interrogative style of Cato to Labienus in the ninth book of Lucan. Of its forms in the outset :

Countess. Good father, wherefore? what should I inquire?
Must I be taught of him, that guilt is woe;
That innocence alone is happiness?'

Of its spirit about the middle of her speech:

'We want no preacher to distinguish vice

From virtue. At our birth the god reveal'd

All conscience needs to know.'

As Mr. Cumberland chose a slighter degree of incest for the subject of his play, I wish he had not written it in prose, and that, with the dexterity of Walpole, he had thrown the occurrence back a few centuries. In hearing or reading the vices of another and distant age, we have a twofold consolation: an involuntary suspicion that the facts may never have been true; and a voluntary belief, that our own times exhibit nothing like them.

A slight sketch of the interest will illustrate and justify

1 'Quid quæri, Labiene, jubes? an liber in armis
Occubuisse velim, potius quam regna videre?
An noceat vis ulla bono?' etc.

Rowe, though even alarmingly paraphrastical, has done this whole speech of Cato with the vigour and majestic ease of Dryden himself.

this remark. Davenant, already a widower, marries the daughter of Sir Edmund Travers; she had a former attachment, but his lordship gets his rival a ship, and sends him upon a distant discovery, perhaps to the North Pole. In a ramble to Spa, Davenant meets with the sister of this very Captain, and under another name marries her. After a short cohabitation he quits her, and from Paris transmits to her an account of his own death. The second wife, conceiving herself a widow, comes to England, and marries clandestinely the son of Davenant. On the morning of her marriage, she accidentally sees her first husband, his father. The circumstances are at length disclosed by Lady Davenant to the 'precious villain,' her husband, who from desperation destroys himself, and so removes the only bar to the happiness of the survivors. Yet the sort of happiness is enviable, and should be preserved as a dramatic rarity. Dormer, the discoverer, comes back to take the command of the real Lady Davenant, and the son has to forget, if possible, that his father was born before. him.

Henderson was amazingly terrible with all these horrors about him; and Miss Younge delightful in the suffering and excellent Lady Davenant. She had a sensible patience in her composition, a dignity in misfortune quite unaffected: and in all her range, and it was a very wide one, never shone more than in the meek endurance of a brutal or profligate husband. This it was that almost rendered her sublime in the Countess of Narbonne. Sir Edmund Travers, a character of odd humour, acted by Yates in this play, showed a peculiar comedy, which we now happily preserve in Dowton: from its chasteness it will combine with tragedy, at a proper distance from the catastrophe.

On the following night Mr. Pratt, whose Fair Circassian has been mentioned, followed up his serious success by a comic failure; it was called The School for Vanity. Among the extraordinary events, a baronet is saved from drowning by an alderman (!) of the name of Ingot. Such an incident passed even dramatic credibility. For the water swells a man, and what a thing should I have been when I had been swoln! I should have been a mountain of mummy.'