part of the vicinity of Shakespeare’s native town. After the busy
time of the ‘Tercentenary,’ Mr. Julian Young sent his servants to
the theatre in Stratford. They had never been in a playhouse before.
The piece represented was ‘Othello.’ On the following morning,
wishing to know the effect of the drama on his servants’ minds,
Mr. Julian Young questioned them in their several departments. The
butler was impressed to this effect: ‘Thank you, sir, for the treat.
The performers performed the performance which they had to perform
excellent well--especially the female performers--in the performance.’
The more impulsive coachman, in the harness-room, exclaimed, ‘’Twas
really beautiful, sir; I liked it onaccountable!’ But when he was
asked what the play was about he frankly confessed he didn’t exactly
know; but that it was very pretty, and was upon sweet-hearting! On a
former occasion, when the gardener and his wife had been treated to
the Bristol Theatre, their master, on the next day, asked, ‘Well,
Robert, what did you see last night?’ The bewildered fellow replied,
after a pause, ‘Well, sir, I saw what you sent me to see!’ ‘What was
that?’ ‘Why, the play, in course.’ ‘Was it a tragedy or a comedy?’
‘I don’t know what you mane. I can’t say no more than I have said,
nor no fairer! All I know is there was a precious lot on ’em on the
theayter stage; and there they was, in and out, and out and in again!’
The wife had more definite ideas. She was all for the second piece,
she said, ‘The pantrymine, and what I liked best in it was where the
fool fellar stooped down and grinned at we through his legs!’ Good
creature! after all, her taste was in tune with that of King George
III., who thought Garrick fidgety, and who laughed himself into fits
at the clown who could get a whole bunch of carrots into his mouth,
and apparently swallow them, with supplementary turnips to make them
go down! The gardener’s wife, therefore, need not be ashamed. She is
not half so much called upon to blush as the wife of the treasurer
of Drury Lane Theatre, who was one of a score of professional ladies
and gentlemen dining together some forty years ago. The lady hearing
‘Venice Preserved’ named, made the remark that she believed ‘it was one
of Shakespeare’s plays, was it not?’ We have ourselves a bill of Drury
Lane, not ten years old, in which ‘Othello’ is announced as Bulwer’s
tragedy, &c.; but that, of course, was a misprint. On our showing it in
the green-room, however, not one of the performers saw the error!
Let us now look at some of the other personages who figured in the
bygone period; and first, of kings. Poor old George III. cannot be said
at any time to have been ‘every inch a king.’ He was certainly not, by
nature, a cruel man. Yet he betrayed something akin to cruelty when,
on the night of the Lord George Gordon riots, an officer who had been
actively employed in suppressing the rioters waited on the king to
make his report. George III. hurried forward to meet him, crying out
with screaming iteration, ‘Well! well! well! I hope you peppered them
well! peppered them well! peppered them well!’ There may, however, have
been nothing more in this than there was in Wellington’s injunction
to his officers on the day that London was threatened with a Chartist
revolution, ‘Remember, gentlemen, there must be no little war.’ In such
cases humanity to revolutionists is lack of mercy to the friends of
order.
It is well known that George III. had an insuperable aversion to Dr.
John Willis, who had attended him when the King was labouring under
his early intermitting attacks of insanity. Willis was induced to take
temporary charge of the King, on Pitt’s promise to make him a baronet
and give him a pension of 1,500_l._ a year--pleasant things which
never came to pass. Queen Charlotte hated Willis even more than the
King did. The physician earned that guerdon by putting George III. in
a strait waistcoat whenever he thought the royal violence required it.
The doctor took this step on his own responsibility. The Queen never
forgave him, and the King, as long as he had memory, never forgot it.
In 1811, when the fatal relapse occurred, brought on, Willis thought,
by Pitt’s persistent pressure of the Roman Catholic claims on the
King’s mind, the Chancellor and the Prince of Wales had some difficulty
in inducing the doctor to take charge of the sovereign. When Willis
entered that part of Windsor Castle which was inhabited by the King
he heard the monarch humming a favourite song in his room. A moment
after George III. crossed the threshold on to the landing-place. He
was in Windsor uniform as to his coat, blue, with scarlet cuffs and
collar, a star on the breast. A waistcoat of buff chamois leather,
buskin breeches and top-boots, with the familiar three-cornered hat,
completed the costume. He came forth as a bridegroom from his chamber,
full of hope and joy, like Cymon, ‘whistling as he went for want of
thought,’ and switching his boot with his whip as he went. Suddenly,
as his eye fell on Willis, he reeled back as if he had been shot. He
shrieked out the hated name, called on God, and fell to the ground.
It was long before the unhappy sovereign could be calmed. In his own
room the King wept like a child. Every now and then he broke into
heartrending exclamations of ‘What can I do without doing wrong? They
forget my coronation oath; but I don’t! Oh, my oath! my oath! my
oath!’ The King’s excitement on seeing Willis was partly caused by his
remembering the Queen’s promise that Willis should never be called in
again in case of the King’s illness. Willis on that occasion consented
to stay with the King after a fearful scene had taken place with the
Queen, her doctors, and council. When Mr. Julian Young knew Willis,
from whom he had the above details, the doctor was above eighty years
of age, upright and active. He was still a mighty hunter; and, unless
Mr. Young was misinformed, on the very day before his death he shot
two or three brace of snipes in the morning, and danced at the Lincoln
ball at night. Willis did not reach his hundredth year, as Dr. Routh,
of Magdalen College, Oxford, did. Just before the death of the latter,
Lord Campbell visited and had a long conversation with him. At parting
the centenarian remarked: ‘I hope it will not be many years before we
meet again.’ ‘Did he think,’ said Lord Campbell afterwards, ‘that he
and I were going to live for ever?’
Monarchs, who have to submit to many tyrannies by which monarchs alone
can suffer, must have an especial dread of levees and presentations.
The monotony must be killing; at the very best, irritating. George
IV. had the stately dreariness very much relieved. On one occasion,
when a nervous gentleman was bowing and passing before him, a
lord-in-waiting kindly whispered to him, ‘Kiss hands!’ The nervous
gentleman accordingly moved on to the door, turned round, and there
kissed his hands airily to the King by way of kindly farewell! George
IV. laughed almost as heartily as his brother, King William, did at an
unlucky alderman who was at Court on the only day Mr. Julian Young ever
felt himself constrained to go into the royal presence. The alderman’s
dress-sword got between his legs as he was backing from that presence,
whereby he was tripped up and fell backwards on the floor. King William
cared not a fig for dignity. He remarked with great glee to those
who stood near: ‘By Jove! the fellow has cut a crab!’ and the kingly
laughter was, as it were, poured point blank into the floundering
alderman. This was not encouraging to Mr. Young, who had to follow. As
newly-appointed royal chaplain in Hampton Court Palace Chapel, King
William had expressed a wish to see him at a levee, and obedience was
a duty. The chaplain had been told by Sir Horace Seymour that he had
nothing to do but follow the example of the gentleman who might happen
to be before him. The principal directions to the neophyte were: ‘Bow
very low, and do not turn your back on the King!’ The instant the
chaplain had kissed the King’s hand, however, he turned his back upon
his sovereign, and hurried off. Sir Horace Seymour afterwards consoled
him for this breach of etiquette by stating that a Surrey baronet who
had followed him made a wider breach in court observance. The unlucky
baronet, seeing the royal hand outstretched, instead of reverently
putting his lips to it, caught hold of it and wrung it heartily! The
King, who loved a joke, probably enjoyed levees, the usual monotony of
which was relieved by such screaming-farce incidents as these.
Those royal brothers, sons of George III., were remarkably outspoken.
They were not witty themselves, but they were now and then the cause
of wit in others. It must have been the Duke of Cumberland who (on
listening to Mr. Nightingale’s story of having been run away with when
driving, and that at a critical moment he jumped out of the carriage)
blandly exclaimed: ‘Fool! fool!’ ‘Now,’ said Nightingale, on telling
the incident to Horace Smith, ‘it’s all very well for him to call me
a fool; but I can’t conceive why he should. Can you?’ ‘No,’ rejoined
Horace, ‘I can’t, because he could not suppose you ignorant of the
fact!’
Among the most unhappy lords of themselves who lived in a past
generation, there was not one who might have been so happy, had he
pleased, as the author of ‘Vathek.’ It is very well said of Beckford
that there has seldom existed a man who, inheriting so much, did so
little for his fellow-creatures. There was a grim humour in some of his
actions. In illustration of this we may state that when Beckford was
living in gorgeous seclusion at Fonthill, two gentlemen, who were the
more curious to spy into the glories of the place because strangers
were forbidden, climbed the park walls at dusk, and on alighting within
the prohibited enclosure, found themselves in presence of the lord of
the place. Beckford awed them by his proud condescension. He politely
dragged them through all the splendours of his palace, and then, with
cruel courtesy, made them dine with him. When the night was advanced,
he took his involuntary guests into the park, bidding them adieu with
the remark, that as they had found their way in they might find their
way out. It was as bad as bandaging a man’s eyes on Salisbury Plain,
and bidding him find his way to Bath. At sunrise the weary guests, who
had pursued a fruitless voyage of discovery all night, were guided to a
point of egress, and they never thought of calling on their host again.
Ready wit in women (now passed away); wit, too, combined with courage,
is by no means rare. During the ruro-diabolical reign of ‘Swing,’
that incarnation of ruffianism, in the person of the most hideous
blackguard in the district, with a mob of thieves and murderers at
his back, attacked Fifield, the old family residence of two elderly
maiden ladies, named Penruddock. When the mob were on the point of
resorting to extreme violence, Miss Betty Penruddock expressed her
astonishment to the ugly leader of the band that ‘such a good-looking
man as he should be captain of such an ill-favoured band of robbers.
Never again will I trust to good looks!’ cried the old lady, whose
flattery so touched the vanity of ‘Swing’ that he prevailed on his
followers to desist. ‘Only give us some beer,’ he said, ‘and we won’t
touch a hair of your head!’ ‘You can’t,’ retorted the plucky old lady,
‘for I wear a wig!’ On the other hand, the vanity of young ladies was
once effectually checked at Hampton Court Chapel. A youthful beauty
once fainted, and the handsome Sir Horace Seymour carried her out.
On successive Sundays successive youthful beauties fainted, and the
handsome Sir Horace carried them successively out, till he grew tired
of bearing such sweet burdens. A report that in future all swooning
nymphs would be carried out of the chapel by _the dustman_ cured the
epidemic.
We are much disposed to think that there is at least as much ready wit
and terseness of expression among the humbler classes as among those
who are higher born and better taught. Much has been said of the ladies
of Llangollen, Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Ponsonby. We question if
in all that has been written of those pseudo-recluses, they have been
half so well hit-off as by Mrs. Morris, a lodging-house keeper in the
neighbourhood. ‘I must say, sir, after all,’ observed Mrs. Morris,
‘that they were very charitable and cantankerous. They did a deal of
good, and never forgave an injury!’ There is something of the ring of
Mrs. Poyser in this pithily-rendered judgment. Quite as sharp a passage
turns up in the person of an eccentric toll-keeper, Old Jeffreys, who
was nearly destitute of mental training, and whom Mr. Julian Young
was anxious to draw to church service. The old man was ready for him.
‘Yes, sir, it be a pity, bain’t it? We pike-keepers, and shepherds, and
carters, and monthly nusses has got souls as well as them that goes to
church and chapel. But what can us do? “Why,” I says, says I, to the
last parson as preached to me, “don’t catechism say summat or other
about doing our duty in that state of life in which we be?” So, after
all, when I be taking toll o’ Sundays, I’m not far wrong, am I?’ The
rector proposed to find a paid substitute for him while he attended
church. Jeffreys was ready with his reply. ‘That ’ud never do, sir,’
he said. ‘What! leave my post to a stranger? What would master say
to me if he heard on’t.’ Mr. Julian Young, pointing with pleasure to
a Bible on old Jeffreys’ shelf, expressed a hope that he often read
it. ‘Can’t say as how I do, sir,’ was the candid rejoinder; ‘I allus
gets so poorus over it!’ When the rector alluded to a certain wench
as ‘disreputable,’ Jeffreys protested in the very spirit of chivalry.
‘Don’t do that! Do as I do! I allus praises her. Charity hides a deal
o’ sin, master! ain’t that Scripture? If it are, am I to be lectured at
for sticking up and saying a good word for she? ‘When it was urged that
this light-o’-love queen ought to be married, Samaritan Jeffreys stept
in with his sympathetic balsam. ‘Poor thing!’ he exclaimed, ‘_she ain’t
no turn to it_!’ The apology was worthy of my Uncle Toby!
There are other stories quite worthy of him who invented Uncle Toby;
but, _basta!_ we have been, as it were, metaphorically dining with Mr.
Julian Young--dining so well that we cannot recall to mind half the
anecdotes told at his table in illustration of Charles Young and his
times.
_WILLIAM CHARLES MACREADY._
In the year 1793, a gentleman who was a member of the Covent Garden
company, in the department of ‘utilities,’ might be seen, any day
during the season, punctually on his way to the theatre, for rehearsal
or for public performance. At the above date he had been seven years
on the London boards, having first appeared at the ‘Garden’ in 1786,
as Flutter in ‘The Belle’s Stratagem.’ His name was William Macready,
father of _the_ Macready, and his _début_ on the English stage was
owing to the influence of Macklin, whom the young fellow had gratified
by playing Egerton to the veteran’s Sir Pertinax, exactly according
to the elaborate instructions he had patiently received from Macklin
himself at rehearsal.
William Macready had left the vocation of his father in Dublin--that
of an upholsterer--for the uncertain glories of the stage. The father
was a common councilman, and was respectably connected--or, rather,
his richer relatives were respectably connected in having him for
a kinsman. In Ireland there is a beggarly pride which looks down
upon trade as a mean thing. Mr. Macready, the flourishing Dublin
upholsterer, took to that sound mean thing, and found his account in so
doing. His prouder kinsmen may have better respected their blood, but
they had not half so good a book at their banker’s.
The upholsterer’s son took his kinsmen’s view of trade, and deserted it
accordingly. He could hardly, however, have gratified them by turning
player; but he followed the bent of his inclinations, addressed himself
to sock and buskin, toiled in country theatres, was tolerated rather
than patronised in his native city, and, as before said, got a footing
on the Covent Garden stage in 1786.
William Macready’s position there in 1793 was much the same that it was
when he first appeared. Perhaps he had a little improved it, by the
popular farce of which he was the author, ‘The Irishman in London,’
which was first acted at Covent Garden in 1792. In 1793 he was held
good enough to act Cassio to Middleton’s Othello, and was held cheap
enough to be cast for Fag in the ‘Rivals.’ On his benefit night--he was
in a position to share the house with Hull--the two partners played
such walking gentlemen’s characters as Cranmer and Surrey (the latter
by Macready) to the Wolsey and Queen Catharine of Mr. and Mrs. Pope;
but Macready, in the afterpiece, soared to vivacious comedy, and acted
Figaro to the Almaviva of mercurial Lewis. If he ever played an Irish
part, it was only when Jack Johnstone was indisposed--which was not his
custom of an afternoon.
The best of these actors, and others better than the best named above,
received but very moderate salaries. Mr. Macready’s was probably
not more than three or four pounds per week. Upon certainly some
such salary the worthy actor maintained a quiet home in Mary Street,
Tottenham Court (or Hampstead) Road. At the head of the little family
that gathered round the table in Mary Street was one of the best of
mothers; and chief among the children--the one at least who became the
most famous--was William Charles Macready, whom so many still remember
as a foremost actor, and in whom some even recognised a great master of
his art.
Among the earliest remembrances of this eminent player, he has noticed
in his most interesting ‘Reminiscences,’ that ‘the _res angustæ domi_
called into active duty all the economical resources and active
management of a mother’ (whose memory, he says, is enshrined in his
heart’s fondest gratitude) ‘to supply the various wants’ of himself and
an elder sister, who only lived long enough to make him ‘sensible of
her angelic nature.’ Macready was the fifth child of this family, but
his sister, Olivia, was the only one (then born) who lived long enough
for him to remember. She was older than he by a year and a half, and
she survived only till he was just in his sixth year; ‘but she lives,’
he says, ‘like a dim and far-off dream, to my memory, of a spirit of
meekness, love, and truth, interposing itself between my infant will
and the evil it purposed. It is like a vision of an angelic influence
upon a most violent and self-willed disposition.’
It may be added here that Macready had a younger brother, Edward, who
distinguished himself as a gallant officer in the army, and two younger
sisters, Letitia and Ellen, to whom he was an affectionate brother
and friend. Meanwhile Macready passed creditably through a school at
Birmingham, and thence to Rugby. At the latter place, where one of his
kinsmen was a master, the student laid the ground of all the classical
knowledge he possessed, took part in private plays, and was hurt at
the thought that he had any inclination to be a professional actor.
At Rugby, too, he showed, but with some reason, the fiery quality of
his temper. He was unjustly sent up for punishment, and was flogged
accordingly. ‘Returning,’ he says, ‘to my form, smarting with choking
rage and indignation, where I had to encounter the compassion of
some and the envious jeers of others, my passion broke out in the
exclamation, “D----n old Birch! I wish he was in Hell!’”
Macready’s excellent mother, of whom he never speaks without dropping,
as it were, a flower to honour her memory, died before he reached home
from Rugby, so that the world was, for a time, without sun to him, for
the sire was not a very amiable person. The younger Macready resorted
to the best possible cure for sorrow, steady and active work, and
plenty of both. At last, with no very cheerful encouragement from his
father and with doubt and fear on his own part, he, in June 1811, made
his _début_, in Birmingham, in ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ ‘the part of Romeo
by a Young Gentleman, being his first appearance on any stage.’ He,
who was afterwards so very cool and self-possessed, nearly marred all
by what is called ‘stage-fright.’ A mist fell on his eyes; the very
applause, as he came forward, bewildered him; and he describes himself
as being for some time like an automaton, moving in certain defined
limits. ‘I went mechanically,’ he says, ‘through the variations in
which I had drilled myself;’ but he gradually gained courage and power
over himself. The audience stimulated the first and rewarded the second
by their applause. ‘Thenceforward,’ says Macready, ‘I trod on air,
became another being or a happier self, and when the curtain fell and
the intimate friends and performers crowded on the stage to raise up
the _Juliet_ and myself, shaking my hands with fervent congratulations,
a lady asked me, ‘Well, sir, how do you feel now?’ my boyish answer
was without disguise, ‘I feel as if I should like to act it all over
again!’
Between this and his first appearance in London Macready acted in
most of the theatres of every degree in the three kingdoms. Often
this practice was rendered the more valuable by his having to perform
with the most perfect actors and actresses who were starring in the
country. But, whether with them or without, whether with audiences
or with a mere two or three, he did his best. Like Barton Booth, he
would play to a man in the pit. ‘It was always my rule,’ he says,
‘to make the best out of a bad house, and before the most meagre
audiences ever assembled it has been my invariable practice to strive
my best, using the opportunity as a lesson; and I am conscious of
having derived great benefit from the rule. I used to call it acting
to myself.’ Macready had another rule which is worth mentioning. Some
of the old French tragedy queens used to keep themselves all day in
the temper of the characters they were to represent in the evening.
So that, at home or on the boards, they swept to and fro in towering
rage. So, Macready was convinced of the necessity of keeping, on the
day of exhibition, the mind as intent as possible on the subject of
the actor’s portraiture, even to the very moment of his entrance on
the scene. With the observance of this rule, Macready must have made
64 Frith Street, Soho, re-echo with joyous feelings and ebullitions of
fury, to suit the temper of the night, when in 1816 he made his bow
to a London audience as Orestes in the ‘Distressed Mother,’ and when
the curtain rose grasped Abbot almost convulsively by the hand, and
dashed upon the stage, exclaiming as in a transport of the highest
joy, ‘Oh, Pylades! what’s life without a friend?’ The Orestes was a
success; but it was never a favourite character with the public, as
Talma’s was with the French. The career thus begun (at ten, fifteen,
and at last eighteen pounds per week for five years) came to a close
in 1851. Five-and-thirty years out of the fifty-eight Macready had
then reached. We need not trace this progressive career, beginning
with Ambrose Phillips and ending with Shakespeare (‘Macbeth’). During
that career he created that one great character in which no player
could come near him, namely, Virginius, in 1820. Macready, however,
was not the original representative of Virginius. That character in
Knowles’s most successful play was first acted by John Cooper in
Glasgow; but Macready really created the part in London. Further,
Macready did his best to raise the drama, actors, and audiences to a
dignity never before known, and gained nothing but honour by his two
ventures at management. He was the first to put a play upon the stage
with an almost lavish perfection. In this way he was never equalled.
Mr. Charles Kean imitated him in this artist-like proceeding; but
that highly respectable actor and man was as far behind Macready in
magnificence of stage management as he was distant from his own father
in genius.