O for a "slip-shod muse," to celebrate in numbers, loose and shambling
as himself, the merits and the person of Mr. Richard Suett, comedian!
Richard, or rather Dicky Suett--for so in his lifetime he was best
pleased to be called, and time hath ratified the appellation--lieth
buried on the north side of the cemetery of Holy Paul, to whose
service his nonage and tender years were set apart and dedicated.
There are who do yet remember him at that period--his pipe clear and
harmonious. He would often speak of his chorister days, when he was
"cherub Dicky."
What clipped his wings, or made it expedient that he should exchange
the holy for the profane state; whether he had lost his good voice
(his best recommendation to that office), like Sir John, "with
hallooing and singing of anthems;" or whether he was adjudged to lack
something, even in those early years, of the gravity indispensable
to an occupation which professeth to "commerce with the skies"--I
could never rightly learn; but we find him, after the probation of a
twelvemonth or so, reverting to a secular condition, and become one of
us.
I think he was not altogether of that timber, out of which cathedral
seats and sounding boards are hewed. But if a glad heart--kind and
therefore glad--be any part of sanctity, then might the robe of
Motley, with which he invested himself with so much humility after
his deprivation, and which he wore so long with so much blameless
satisfaction to himself and to the public, be accepted for a
surplice--his white stole, and _albe_.
The first fruits of his secularization was an engagement upon the
boards of Old Drury, at which theatre he commenced, as I have been
told, with adopting the manner of Parsons in old men's characters. At
the period in which most of us knew him, he was no more an imitator
than he was in any true sense himself imitable.
He was the Robin Good-Fellow of the stage. He came in to trouble all
things with a welcome perplexity, himself no whit troubled for the
matter. He was known, like Puck, by his note--_Ha! Ha! Ha!_--sometimes
deepening to _Ho! Ho! Ho!_ with an irresistible accession, derived
perhaps remotely from his ecclesiastical education, foreign to
his prototype, of--_O La!_ Thousands of hearts yet respond to the
chuckling _O La!_ of Dicky Suett, brought back to their remembrance by
the faithful transcript of his friend Mathews's mimicry. The "force of
nature could no further go." He drolled upon the stock of these two
syllables richer than the cuckoo.
Care, that troubles all the world, was forgotten in his composition.
Had he had but two grains (nay, half a grain) of it, he could never
have supported himself upon those two spider's strings, which served
him (in the latter part of his unmixed existence) as legs. A doubt or
a scruple must have made him totter, a sigh have puffed him down;
the weight of a frown had staggered him, a wrinkle made him lose his
balance. But on he went, scrambling upon those airy stilts of his,
with Robin Good-Fellow, "thorough brake, thorough briar," reckless of
a scratched face or a torn doublet.
Shakspeare foresaw him, when he framed his fools and jesters. They
have all the true Suett stamp, a loose gait, a slippery tongue, this
last the ready midwife to a without-pain-delivered jest; in words
light as air, venting truths deep as the centre; with idlest rhymes
tagging conceit when busiest, singing with Lear in the tempest, or Sir
Toby at the buttery hatch.
Jack Bannister and he had the fortune to be more of personal
favourites with the town than any actors before or after. The
difference, I take it, was this:--Jack was more _beloved_ for his
sweet, good-natured, moral, pretensions. Dicky was more _liked_ for
his sweet, good-natured, no pretensions at all. Your whole conscience
stirred with Bannister's performance of Walter in the Children in the
Wood--how dearly beautiful it was!--but Dicky seemed like a thing, as
Shakspeare says of Love, too young to know what conscience is. He put
us into Vesta's days. Evil fled before him--not as from Jack, as from
an antagonist,--but because it could not touch him, any more than a
cannon-ball a fly. He was delivered from the burthen of that death;
and, when Death came himself, not in metaphor, to fetch Dicky, it is
recorded of him by Robert Palmer, who kindly watched his exit, that he
received the last stroke, neither varying his accustomed tranquillity,
nor tune, with the simple exclamation, worthy to have been recorded in
his epitaph--_O La!--O La! Bobby!_