Linco: You need not repeat.
Prenesto: Help me! oh help me!
[A wild Boar struck by Prenesto.]
Huntsman: Lets try to assist him.
Linco: Ye Gods, what Alarm!
Huntsman: Quick run to his aid.
[Enter Prenesto: The Boar pursuing him.]
Prenesto: O Heavns! who defends me?
Camilla: My Arm.
[She throws a Dart, and kills the Boar.]
Linco: Dorinda of nothing afraid,
Shes sprightly and gay, a valiant Maid,
And as bright as the Day.
Camilla: Take Courage, Hunter, the Savage is dead.
Katherine Tofts, the daughter of a person in the family of Bishop
Burnet, had great natural charms of voice, person, and manner. Playing
with Nicolini, singing English to his Italian, she was the first of our
'prime donne' in Italian Opera. Mrs. Tofts had made much money when
in 1709 she quitted the stage with disordered intellect; her voice being
then unbroken, and her beauty in the height of its bloom. Having
recovered health, she married Mr. Joseph Smith, a rich patron of arts
and collector of books and engravings, with whom she went to Venice,
when he was sent thither as English Consul. Her madness afterwards
returned, she lived, therefore, says Sir J. Hawkins,
'sequestered from the world in a remote part of the house, and had a
large garden to range in, in which she would frequently walk, singing
and giving way to that innocent frenzy which had seized her in the
earlier part of her life.'
She identified herself with the great princesses whose loves and sorrows
she had represented in her youth, and died about the year 1760.]
[Footnote 4: The 'Emperor of the Moon' is a farce, from the French,
by Mrs. Aphra Behn, first acted in London in 1687. It was originally
Italian, and had run 80 nights in Paris as 'Harlequin I'Empereur dans
le Monde de la Lune'. In Act II. sc. 3,
'The Front of the Scene is only a Curtain or Hangings to be drawn up
at Pleasure.'
Various gay masqueraders, interrupted by return of the Doctor, are
carried by Scaramouch behind the curtain. The Doctor enters in wrath,
vowing he has heard fiddles. Presently the curtain is drawn up and
discovers where Scaramouch has
'plac'd them all in the Hanging in which they make the Figures, where
they stand without Motion in Postures.'
Scaramouch professes that the noise was made by putting up this piece of
Tapestry,
'the best in Italy for the Rareness of the Figures, sir.'
While the Doctor is admiring the new tapestry, said to have been sent
him as a gift, Harlequin, who is
'placed on a Tree in the Hangings, hits him on the 'Head with his
Truncheon.'
The place of a particular figure in the picture, with a hand on a tree,
is that supposed to be aspired to by the 'Spectator's' next
correspondent.]
[Footnote 5: 'The Fortune Hunters, or Two Fools Well Met,' a Comedy
first produced in 1685, was the only work of James Carlile, a player who
quitted the stage to serve King William III. in the Irish Wars, and was
killed at the battle of Aghrim. The crowning joke of the second Act of
'the Fortune Hunters' is the return at night of Mr. Spruce, an Exchange
man, drunk and musical, to the garden-door of his house, when Mrs.
Spruce is just taking leave of young Wealthy. Wealthy hides behind the
pump. The drunken husband, who has been in a gutter, goes to the pump to
clean himself, and seizes a man's arm instead of a pump-handle. He works
it as a pump-handle, and complains that 'the pump's dry;' upon which
Young Wealthy empties a bottle of orange-flower water into his face.]
[Footnote 6: In the third act of Fletcher's comedy of the 'Pilgrim',
Pedro, the Pilgrim, a noble gentleman, has shown to him the interior of
a Spanish mad-house, and discovers in it his mistress Alinda, who,
disguised in a boy's dress, was found in the town the night before a
little crazed, distracted, and so sent thither. The scene here shows
various shapes of madness,
Some of pity
That it would make ye melt to see their passions,
And some as light again.