The title, I think, will strike. The fashion, you know, now, is to
do away with old prejudices, and to rescue certain characters from
the illiberal odium with which custom has marked them. Thus we
have a generous Israelite, an amiable cynic, and so on. Now, Sir,
I call my play--_The Humane Footpad_.--SYLVESTER DAGGERWOOD.
Some four or five seasons since, the eccentric Buckstone produced a
three-act farce, which, by dint of its after title--_The School for
Sympathy_--and of much highly comic woe, exhibited in the acting of Farren
and Nisbett, was presented to uproariously-affected audiences during some
score nights. The hinge of the mirth was made to turn upon the
irresistible drollery of one man's running away with another man's wife,
and the outrageous fun of the consequent suicide of the injured husband;
the _bons mots_ being most tragically humorous, and the aphorisms of the
several characters facetiously concatenative of the nouns contained in the
leading name of the piece--"_Love_ and _Murder_."
Now this was a magnificent idea--one of those brilliant efforts which
cannot but tend to lift the theatre in the estimation of every man of
delicacy and education. A new source of attraction was at once
discovered,--a vast fund of available fuel was suddenly found to recruit
the cinerulent embers of the drama withal. It became evident that, after
Joe Miller, the ordinary of Newgate was the funniest dog in the world.
Manslaughter, arson, and the more practical jokes in the Calendar, were
already familiar to the stage; it was a refinement of the Haymarket
authors to introduce those livelier sallies of wit--crim. con. and
felo-de-se. The "immense coalitions" of all manner of crimes and vices in
the subsequent "highway school"--the gradual development of every
unnatural tendency in the youthful Jack Sheppard (another immor-t-al work
by the author of the afore-lauded comedy)--the celebration, by a classic
chaunt, of his reaching the pinnacle of depravity; this was the _ne plus
ultra_ of dramatic invention. Robbers and murderers began to be treated,
after the Catholic fashion, with extreme unction; audiences were
intoxicated with the new drop; sympathy became epidemic; everybody was
bewildered and improved; and nobody went and threw themselves off the
Monument with a copy of the baleful drama in his pocket!
But the magnificence of the discovery was too large to be grasped by even
the gluttonous eye of the managers, The Adelphi might overflow--the Surrey
might quake with reiterated "pitsfull"--still there remained over and
above the feast-crumbs sufficient for the battenings of other than
theatrical appetites. Immediately the press-gang--we beg pardon, the
_press_--arose, and with a mighty throe spawned many monsters. Great
drama! _Greater Press!_ GREATEST PUBLIC!
Now this was all excellent well as far as it went; but still there was
something wanted of more reality than the improvisations of a romancist.
Ainsworth might dip his pen in the grossest epithets; Boz might dabble in
the mysterious dens of Hebrew iniquity; even Bulwer might hash up to us
his recollections of St. Giles's dialogue; and yet it was evident that
they were all the while only "shamming"--only cooking up some dainty dish
according to a _recipe_, or, as it is still frequently pronounced, a
_receipt_,--which last, with such writers, will ever be the guide-post of
their track.
But something more was wanted; and here it is--here, in the Memoirs of
Marie Cappelle.
This lady, perhaps the most remarkable woman of her age, has published a
book--half farce, half novel--in which she treats by turns with the
clap-trap agony of a Bulwer, the quaint sneer of a Dickens, and the
effrontery of an Ainsworth, that serious charge which employed the careful
investigation of the most experienced men in France for many weeks, and
which excited a degree of interest in domestic England almost unexampled
in the history of foreign trials. This work is published by a gentleman
who calls himself "Publisher in ordinary to her Majesty," and may be
procured at any book-seller's by all such as have a guinea and a day's
leisure at the mercy of the literary charlatan who contrived it.
In the strictest confidence we would suggest, that if a treaty could be
ratified with Madame Marie Cappelle Laffarge, we do not doubt that our
nursery--yea, our laundry--maids would learn to spell the precious
sentences, to their own great edification and that of the children placed
under their charge.
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