Part 15 (1/2)
Home, to King's Place, his mother.
{66} ”Ticket-nights.” This phrase is probably unintelligible to the untheatrical portion of the community, which may now be said to be all the world except the actors. Ticket-nights are those whereon the inferior actors club for a benefit: each distributes as many tickets of admission as he is able among his friends. A motley a.s.semblage is the consequence; and as each actor is encouraged by his own set, who are not in general play-going people, the applause comes (as Chesterfield says of Pope's attempts at wit) ”generally unseasonably, and too often unsuccessfully.”
{67} Originally:- ”Back to the BOTTOM LEAPING WITH A BOUND,” altered 1833.
{68} ”This journal was, at the period in question, rather remarkable for the use of the figure called by the rhetoricians catachresis.
The Bard of Avon may be quoted in justification of its adoption, when he writes of taking arms against a sea, and seeking a bubble in the mouth of a cannon. The Morning Post, in the year 1812, congratulated its readers upon having stripped off Cobbett's mask and discovered his cloven foot; adding, that it was high time to give the hydra-head of Faction a rap on the knuckles!”
{68a} The Rev. George Crabbe.--The writer's first interview with this poet, who may be designated Pope in worsted stockings, took place at William Spencer's villa at Petersham, close to what that gentleman called his gold-fish pond, though it was scarcely three feet in diameter, throwing up a jet d'eau like a thread. The venerable bard, seizing both the hands of his satirist exclaimed with a good-humoured laugh, ”Ah! my old enemy, how do you do?” In the course of conversation, he expressed great astonishment at his popularity in London; adding, ”In my own village they think nothing of me.” The subject happening to be the inroads of time upon beauty, the writer quoted the following lines:-
”Six years had pa.s.s'd, and forty ere the six, When Time began to play his usual tricks: My locks, once comely in a virgin's sight, Locks of pure brown, now felt th' encroaching white; Gradual each day I liked my horses less, My dinner more--I learnt to play at chess.”
”That's very good!” cried the bard;--”whose to it?” ”Your own.”
”Indeed! hah! well, I had quite forgotten it.” Was this affectation, or was it not? In sooth, he seemed to push simplicity to puerility.
This imitation contained in ma.n.u.script the following lines, after describing certain Sunday newspaper critics who were supposed to be present at a new play, and who were rather heated in their politics:-
”Hard is the task who edits--thankless job! - A Sunday journal for the factious mob With bitter paragraph and caustic jest, He gives to turbulence the day of rest; Condemn'd, this week, rash rancour to instil, Or thrown aside, the next, for one who will: Alike undone or if he praise or rail (For this affects his safety, that his sale), He sinks at last, in luckless limbo set, If loud for libel, and if dumb for debt.”
They were, however, never printed; being, on reflection, considered too serious for the occasion.
It is not a little extraordinary that Crabbe, who could write with such rigour, should descend to such lines as the following:-
”Something bad happen'd wrong about a bill Which was not drawn with true mercantile skill, So, to amend it, I was told to go And seek the firm of Clutterbuck and Co.”
Surely ”Emanuel Jennings,” compared with the above, rises to sublimity.
[”'The Theatre,' by the Rev. G. Crabbe, we rather think, is the best piece in the collection. It is an exquisite and most masterly imitation, not only of the peculiar style, but of the taste, temper, and manner of description of that most original author; and can hardly be said to be in any respect a caricature of that style or manner--except in the excessive profusion of puns and verbal jingles- -which, though undoubtedly to be ranked among his characteristics, are never so thick sown in his original works as in this admirable imitation. It does not aim, of course, at any shadow of his pathos or moral sublimity, but seems to us to be a singularly faithful copy of his pa.s.sages of mere description,”--JEFFREY, Edinburgh Review.]
{68b} You were more feeling than I was, when you read the excellent parodies of the young men who wrote the ”Rejected Addresses.” There is a little ill-nature--and I take the liberty of adding, undeserved ill-nature--in their prefatory address; but in their versification they have done me admirably. They are extraordinary men; but it is easier to imitate style than to furnish matter.--CRABBE (Works, 1 vol. Ed., p. 81).
{69} A street and parish in Lime Street Ward, London--chiefly inhabited by Jews.
{70} ”We come next to three ludicrous parodies--of the story of The Stranger, of George Barnwell, and of the dagger-scene in Macbeth, under the signature of Momus Medlar. They are as good, we think, as that sort of thing can be, and remind us of the happier efforts of Colman, whose less successful fooleries are professedly copied in the last piece in the volume.”--JEFFREY, Edinburgh Renew.
{71} A translation from Kotzebue by Thompson, and first acted at Drury Lane, 24th March, 1798. Mrs. Siddons was famous in the part of Mrs. Haller.
{72} See Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, vol. iii.; and Lillo's tragedy, ”The London Merchant; or, the History of George Barnwell.” 8vo. 1731.
{73} Theodore Hook, at that time a very young man, and the companion of the annotator in many wild frolics. The cleverness of his subsequent prose compositions has cast his early stage songs into oblivion. This parody was, in the second edition, transferred from Colman to Hook.
{74} Then Director of the Opera House.
{75} At that time the chief dancer at this establishment.
{76} Vauxhall Bridge then, like the Thames Tunnel at present [1833], stood suspended in the middle of that river.
{76b} Dr. Busby gave living recitations of his translation of Lucretius, with tea and bread-and-b.u.t.ter. He sent in a real Address to the Drury Lane committee, which was really rejected. The present imitation professes to be recited by the translator's son. The poet here, again, was a prophet. A few evenings after the opening of the Theatre Dr. Busby sat with his son in one of the stage-boxes. The latter to the astonishment of the audience, at the end of the play, stepped from the box upon the stage, with his father's real rejected address in his hand, and began to recite it as follows:-