There are of madmen, as there are of tame,

All humour'd not alike. We have here some

So apish and fantastic, play with a feather;

And though 'twould grieve a soul to see God's image

So blemish'd and defac'd, yet do they act

Such antick and such pretty lunacies,

That, spite of sorrow, they will make you smile.

Others again we have, like angry lions,

Fierce as wild bulls, untameable as flies.

"Honest Whore."

It is the force of these kindly admixtures, which assimilates the scenes

of Hogarth and of Shakspeare to the drama of real life, where no such

thing as pure tragedy is to be found; but merriment and infelicity,

ponderous crime and feather-light vanity, like twiformed births,

disagreeing complexions of one intertexture, perpetually unite to shew

forth motley spectacles to the world. Then it is that the poet or

painter shews his art, when in the selection of these comic adjuncts he

chooses such circumstances as shall relieve, contrast with, or fall

into, without forming a violent opposition to, his principal object. Who

sees not that the Grave-digger in _Hamlet_, the Fool in _Lear_, have a

kind of correspondency to, and fall in with, the subjects which they

seem to interrupt, while the comic stuff in _Venice Preserved_, and the

doggrel nonsense of the Cook and his poisoning associates in the _Rollo_

of Beaumont and Fletcher, are pure, irrelevant, impertinent

discords,--as bad as the quarrelling dog and cat under the table of the

_Lord and the Disciples at Emmaus_ of Titian?

Not to tire the reader with perpetual reference to prints which he may

not be fortunate enough to possess, it may be sufficient to remark, that

the same tragic cast of expression and incident, blended in some

instances with a greater alloy of comedy, characterizes his other great

work, the _Marriage Alamode_, as well as those less elaborate exertions

of his genius, the prints called _Industry and Idleness_, the _Distrest

Poet_, &c. forming, with the _Harlot's_ and _Rake's Progresses_, the

most considerable if not the largest class of his productions,--enough

surely to rescue Hogarth from the imputation of being a mere buffoon, or

one whose general aim was only to _shake the sides_.

There remains a very numerous class of his performances, the object of

which must be confessed to be principally comic. But in all of them will

be found something to distinguish them from the droll productions of

Bunbury and others. They have this difference, that we do not merely

laugh at, we are led into long trains of reflection by them. In this

respect they resemble the characters of Chaucer's _Pilgrims_, which have

strokes of humour in them enough to designate them for the most part as

comic, but our strongest feeling still is wonder at the

comprehensiveness of genius which could crowd, as poet and painter have

done, into one small canvas so many diverse yet co-operating materials.

The faces of Hogarth have not a mere momentary interest, as in

caricatures, or those grotesque physiognomies which we sometimes catch a

glance of in the street, and, struck with their whimsicality, wish for a

pencil and the power to sketch them down; and forget them again as

rapidly,--but they are permanent abiding ideas. Not the sports of

nature, but her necessary eternal classes. We feel that we cannot part

with any of them, lest a link should be broken.

It is worthy of observation, that he has seldom drawn a mean or

insignificant countenance.[12] Hogarth's mind was eminently reflective;

and, as it has been well observed of Shakspeare, that he has transfused

his own poetical character into the persons of his drama (they are all

more or less _poets_) Hogarth has impressed a _thinking character_ upon

the persons of his canvas. This remark must not be taken universally.

The exquisite idiotism of the little gentleman in the bag and sword

beating his drum in the print of the _Enraged Musician_, would of itself

rise up against so sweeping an assertion. But I think it will be found

to be true of the generality of his countenances. The knife-grinder and

Jew flute-player in the plate just mentioned may serve as instances

instead of a thousand. They have intense thinking faces, though the

purpose to which they are subservient by no means required it; but

indeed it seems as if it was painful to Hogarth to contemplate mere

vacancy or insignificance.

[12] If there are any of that description, they are in his

_Strolling Players_, a print which has been cried up by Lord Orford

as the richest of his productions, and it may be, for what I know,

in the mere lumber, the properties, and dead furniture of the scene,

but in living character and expression it is (for Hogarth)

lamentably poor and wanting; it is perhaps the only one of his

performances at which we have a right to feel disgusted.

This reflection of the artist's own intellect from the faces of his

characters, is one reason why the works of Hogarth, so much more than

those of any other artist are objects of meditation. Our intellectual

natures love the mirror which gives them back their own likenesses. The

mental eye will not bend long with delight upon vacancy.

Another line of eternal separation between Hogarth and the common

painters of droll or burlesque subjects, with whom he is often

confounded, is the sense of beauty, which in the most unpromising

subjects seems never wholly to have deserted him. "Hogarth himself,"

says Mr. Coleridge,[13] from whom I have borrowed this observation,

speaking of a scene which took place at Ratzeburg, "never drew a more

ludicrous distortion, both of attitude and physiognomy, than this effect

occasioned: nor was there wanting beside it one of those beautiful

female faces which the same Hogarth, _in whom the satirist never

extinguished that love of beauty which belonged to him as a poet_, so

often and so gladly introduces as the central figure in a crowd of

humorous deformities, which figure (such is the power of true genius)

neither acts nor is meant to act as a contrast; but diffuses through

all, and over each of the group, a spirit of reconciliation and human

kindness; and even when the attention is no longer consciously directed

to the cause of this feeling, still blends its tenderness with our

laughter: and _thus prevents the instructive merriment at the whims of

nature, or the foibles or humours of our fellow-men, from degenerating

into the heart-poison of contempt or hatred_." To the beautiful females

in Hogarth, which Mr. C. has pointed out, might be added, the frequent

introduction of children (which Hogarth seems to have taken a

particular delight in) into his pieces. They have a singular effect in

giving tranquillity and a portion of their own innocence to the subject.

The baby riding in its mother's lap in the _March to Finchley_, (its

careless innocent face placed directly behind the intriguing

time-furrowed countenance of the treason-plotting French priest)

perfectly sobers the whole of that tumultuous scene. The boy mourner

winding up his top with so much unpretended insensibility in the plate

of the _Harlot's Funeral_, (the only thing in that assembly that is not

a hypocrite) quiets and soothes the mind that has been disturbed at the

sight of so much depraved man and woman kind.

[13] _The Friend_, No. XVI.

I had written thus far, when I met with a passage in the writings of the

late Mr. Barry, which, as it falls in with the _vulgar notion_

respecting Hogarth, which this Essay has been employed in combating, I

shall take the liberty to transcribe, with such remarks as may suggest

themselves to me in the transcription; referring the reader for a full

answer to that which has gone before.

"Notwithstanding Hogarth's merit does undoubtedly entitle him to an

honourable place amongst the artists, and that his little compositions

considered as so many dramatic representations, abounding with humour,

character, and extensive observations on the various incidents of low,

faulty, and vicious life, are very ingeniously brought together, and

frequently tell their own story with more facility than is often found

in many of the elevated and more noble inventions of Raffael, and other

great men; yet it must be honestly confessed, that in what is called

knowledge of the figure, foreigners have justly observed, that Hogarth

is often so raw, and uninformed, as hardly to deserve the name of an

artist. But this capital defect is not often perceivable, as examples of

the naked and of elevated nature but rarely occur in his subjects, which

are for the most part filled with characters, that in their nature tend

to deformity; besides, his figures are small, and the junctures, and

other difficulties of drawing that might occur in their limbs, are

artfully concealed with their cloaths, rags, &c. But what would atone

for all his defects, even if they were twice told, is his admirable fund

of invention, ever inexhaustible in its resources; and his satire, which

is always sharp and pertinent, and often highly moral, was (except in a

few instances, where he weakly and meanly suffered his integrity to

give way to his envy) seldom or never employed in a dishonest or unmanly

way.

Hogarth has been often imitated in his satirical vein, sometimes in his

humorous; but very few have attempted to rival him in his moral walk.

The line of art pursued by my very ingenious predecessor and brother

academician, Mr. Penny, is quite distinct from that of Hogarth, and is

of a much more delicate and superior relish; he attempts the heart, and

reaches it, whilst Hogarth's general aim is only to shake the sides: in

other respects no comparison can be thought of, as Mr. Penny has all

that knowledge of the figure and academical skill which the other

wanted. As to Mr. Bunbury, who had so happily succeeded in the vein of

humour and caricatura, he has for some time past altogether relinquished

it, for the more amiable pursuit of beautiful nature: this indeed is not

to be wondered at, when we recollect that he has, in Mrs. Bunbury, so

admirable an exemplar of the most finished grace and beauty, continually

at his elbow. But (to say all that occurs to me on this subject) perhaps

it may be reasonably doubted, whether the being much conversant with

Hogarth's method of exposing meanness, deformity, and vice, in many of

his works, is not rather a dangerous, or, at least, a worthless pursuit;

which, if it does not find a false relish, and a love of, and search

after satire and buffoonery in the spectator, is at least not unlikely

to give him one. Life is short, and the little leisure of it is much

better laid out upon that species of art, which is employed upon the

amiable and the admirable, as it is more likely to be attended with

better and nobler consequences to ourselves. These two pursuits in art,

may be compared with two sets of people with whom we might associate; if

we give ourselves up to the Footes, the Kenricks, &c. we shall be

continually busied, and paddling in whatever is ridiculous, faulty, and

vicious in life; whereas there are those to be found, with whom we

should be in the constant pursuit and study of all that gives a value

and a dignity to human nature." [Account of a Series of Pictures in the

Great Room of the Society of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, at the

Adelphi, by James Barry, R.A., Professor of Painting to the Royal

Academy; reprinted in the last quarto edition of his works.]

"----it must be honestly confessed, that in what is called knowledge of

the figure, foreigners have justly observed," &c.

It is a secret well known to the professors of the art and mystery of

criticism, to insist upon what they do not find in a man's works, and to

pass over in silence what they do. That Hogarth did not draw the naked

figure so well as Michael Angelo might be allowed, especially as

"examples of the naked," as Mr. Barry acknowledges, "rarely (he might

almost have said never) occur in his subjects;" and that his figures

under their draperies do not discover all the fine graces of an Antinous

or an Apollo, may be conceded likewise; perhaps it was more suitable to

his purpose to represent the average forms of mankind in the mediocrity

(as Mr. Burke expresses it) of the age in which he lived: but that his

figures in general, and in his best subjects, are so glaringly incorrect

as is here insinuated, I dare trust my own eye so far as positively to

deny the fact. And there is one part of the figure in which Hogarth is

allowed to have excelled, which these foreigners seem to have

overlooked, or perhaps calculating from its proportion to the whole (a

seventh or an eighth, I forget which) deemed it of trifling importance;

I mean the human face; a small part, reckoning by geographical inches,

in the map of man's body, but here it is that the painter of expression

must condense the wonders of his skill, even at the expense of

neglecting the "jonctures and other difficulties of drawing in the

limbs," which it must be a cold eye that in the interest so strongly

demanded by Hogarth's countenances has leisure to survey and censure.

"The line of art pursued by my very ingenious predecessor and brother

academician, Mr. Penny."

The first impression caused in me by reading this passage, was an eager

desire to know who this Mr. Penny was. This great surpasser of Hogarth

in the "delicacy of his relish," and the "line which he pursued," where

is he, what are his works, what has he to shew? In vain I tried to

recollect, till by happily putting the question to a friend who is more

conversant in the works of the illustrious obscure than myself, I

learned that he was the painter of a _Death of Wolfe_ which missed the

prize the year that the celebrated picture of West on the same subject

obtained it; that he also made a picture of the _Marquis of Granby

relieving a Sick Soldier_; moreover, that he was the inventor of two

pictures of _Suspended and Restored Animation_, which I now remember to

have seen in the Exhibition some years since, and the prints from which

are still extant in good men's houses. This then I suppose is the line

of subjects in which Mr. Penny was so much superior to Hogarth. I

confess I am not of that opinion. The relieving of poverty by the purse,

and the restoring a young man to his parents by using the methods

prescribed by the Humane Society, are doubtless very amiable subjects,

pretty things to teach the first rudiments of humanity; they amount to

about as much instruction as the stories of good boys that give away

their custards to poor beggar-boys in children's books. But, good God!

is this _milk for babes_ to be set up in opposition to Hogarth's moral

scenes, his _strong meat for men_? As well might we prefer the fulsome

verses upon their own goodness, to which the gentlemen of the Literary

Fund annually sit still with such shameless patience to listen, to the

satires of Juvenal and Persius; because the former are full of tender

images of Worth relieved by Charity, and Charity stretching out her hand

to rescue sinking Genius, and the theme of the latter is men's crimes

and follies with their black consequences--forgetful meanwhile of those

strains of moral pathos, those sublime heart-touches, which these poets

(in _them_ chiefly shewing themselves poets) are perpetually darting

across the otherwise appalling gloom of their subject--consolatory

remembrancers, when their pictures of guilty mankind have made us even

to despair for our species, that there is such a thing as virtue and

moral dignity in the world, that her unquenchable spark is not utterly

out--refreshing admonitions, to which we turn for shelter from the too

great heat and asperity of the general satire.

And is there nothing analogous to this in Hogarth? nothing which

"attempts and reaches the heart?"--no aim beyond that of "shaking the

sides?"--if the kneeling ministering female in the last scene of the

_Rake's Progress_, the Bedlam scene, of which I have spoken before, and

have dared almost to parallel it with the most absolute idea of Virtue

which Shakspeare has left us, be not enough to disprove the assertion;

if the sad endings of the Harlot and the Rake, the passionate

heart-bleeding entreaties for forgiveness which the adulterous wife is

pouring forth to her assassinated and dying lord in the last scene but

one of the _Marriage Alamode_,--if these be not things to touch the

heart, and dispose the mind to a meditative tenderness: is there nothing

sweetly conciliatory in the mild, patient face and gesture with which

the wife seems to allay and ventilate the feverish irritated feelings of

her poor poverty-distracted mate (the true copy of the _genus

irritabile_) in the print of the _Distrest Poet_? or if an image of

maternal love be required, where shall we find a sublimer view of it

than in that aged woman in _Industry and Idleness_ (plate v.) who is

clinging with the fondness of hope not quite extinguished to her brutal

vice-hardened child, whom she is accompanying to the ship which is to

bear him away from his native soil, of which he has been adjudged

unworthy: in whose shocking face every trace of the human countenance

seems obliterated, and a brute beast's to be left instead, shocking and

repulsive to all but her who watched over it in its cradle before it was

so sadly altered, and feels it must belong to her while a pulse by the

vindictive laws of his country shall be suffered to continue to beat in

it. Compared with such things, what is Mr. Penny's "knowledge of the

figure and academical skill which Hogarth wanted?"

With respect to what follows concerning another gentleman, with the

congratulations to him on his escape out of the regions of "humour and

caricatura," in which it appears he was in danger of travelling side by

side with Hogarth, I can only congratulate my country, that Mrs. Hogarth

knew _her_ province better than by disturbing her husband at his pallet

to divert him from that universality of subject, which has stamped him

perhaps, next to Shakspeare, the most inventive genius which this island

has produced, into the "amiable pursuit of beautiful nature," _i.e._

copying ad infinitum the individual charms and graces of Mrs. H----.

"Hogarth's method of exposing meanness, deformity, and vice, paddling in

whatever is ridiculous, faulty, and vicious."

A person unacquainted with the works thus stigmatised, would be apt to

imagine, that in Hogarth there was nothing else to be found but subjects

of the coarsest and most repulsive nature. That his imagination was

naturally unsweet, and that he delighted in raking into every species of

moral filth. That he preyed upon sore places only, and took a pleasure

in exposing the unsound and rotten parts of human nature;--whereas, with

the exception of some of the plates of the _Harlot's Progress_, which

are harder in their character than any of the rest of his productions,

(the _Stages of Cruelty_ I omit as mere worthless caricaturas, foreign

to his general habits, the offspring of his fancy in some wayward

humour), there is scarce one of his pieces where vice is most strongly

satirised, in which some figure is not introduced upon which the moral

eye may rest satisfied; a face that indicates goodness, or perhaps mere

good humouredness and carelessness of mind (negation of evil) only, yet

enough to give a relaxation to the frowning brow of satire, and keep the

general air from tainting. Take the mild, supplicating posture of

patient Poverty in the poor woman that is persuading the pawnbroker to

accept her clothes in pledge, in the plate of _Gin Lane_, for an

instance. A little does it, a little of the _good_ nature overpowers a

world of _bad_. One cordial honest laugh of a Tom Jones absolutely

clears the atmosphere that was reeking with the black putrifying

breathings of a hypocrite Blifil. One homely expostulating shrug from

Strap, warms the whole air which the suggestions of a gentlemanly

ingratitude from his friend Random had begun to freeze. One "Lord bless

us!" of Parson Adams upon the wickedness of the times, exorcises and

purges off the mass of iniquity which the world-knowledge of even a

Fielding could cull out and rake together. But of the severer class of

Hogarth's performances, enough, I trust, has been said to shew that they

do not merely shock and repulse; that there is in them the "scorn of

vice" and the "pity" too; something to touch the heart, and keep alive

the sense of moral beauty; the "lacrymæ rerum," and the sorrowing by

which the heart is made better. If they be bad things, then is satire

and tragedy a bad thing; let us proclaim at once an age of gold, and

sink the existence of vice and misery in our speculations; let us

----wink, and shut our apprehensions up

From common sense of what men were and are:

let us _make believe_ with the children that every body is good and

happy; and, with Dr. Swift, write panegyrics upon the world.

But that larger half of Hogarth's works which were painted more for

entertainment than instruction (though such was the suggestiveness of

his mind, that there is always something to be learnt from them) his

humourous scenes,--are they such as merely to disgust and set us against

our species?

The confident assertions of such a man as I consider the late Mr. Barry

to have been, have that weight of authority in them which staggers, at

first hearing, even a long preconceived opinion. When I read his

pathetic admonition concerning the shortness of life, and how much

better the little leisure of it were laid out upon "that species of art

which is employed about the amiable and the admirable;" and Hogarth's

"method" proscribed as a "dangerous or worthless pursuit," I began to

think there was something in it; that I might have been indulging all my

life a passion for the works of this artist, to the utter prejudice of

my taste and moral sense; but my first convictions gradually returned, a

world of good-natured English faces came up one by one to my

recollection, and a glance at the matchless _Election Entertainment_,

which I have the happiness to have hanging up in my parlour, subverted

Mr. Barry's whole theory in an instant.

In that inimitable print, (which in my judgment as far exceeds the more

known and celebrated _March to Finchley_, as the best comedy exceeds the

best farce that ever was written,) let a person look till he be

saturated, and when he has done wondering at the inventiveness of genius

which could bring so many characters (more than thirty distinct classes

of face) into a room, and set them down at table together, or otherwise

dispose them about, in so natural a manner, engage them in so many easy

sets and occupations, yet all partaking of the spirit of the occasion

which brought them together, so that we feel that nothing but an

election time could have assembled them; having no central figure or

principal group, (for the hero of the piece, the Candidate, is properly

set aside in the levelling indistinction of the day, one must look for

him to find him) nothing to detain the eye from passing from part to

part, where every part is alike instinct with life,--for here are no

furniture-faces, no figures brought in to fill up the scene like stage

choruses, but all dramatis personæ: when he shall have done wondering at

all these faces so strongly charactered, yet finished with the accuracy

of the finest miniature; when he shall have done admiring the numberless

appendages of the scene, those gratuitous doles which rich genius flings

into the heap when it has already done enough, the over-measure which it

delights in giving, as if its stores were exhaustless; the dumb rhetoric

of the scenery--for tables, and chairs, and joint-stools in Hogarth,

are living and significant things; the witticisms that are expressed by

words, (all artists but Hogarth have failed when they have endeavoured

to combine two mediums of expression, and have introduced words into

their pictures), and the unwritten numberless little allusive

pleasantries that are scattered about; the work that is going on in the

scene, and beyond it, as is made visible to the "eye of mind," by the

mob which choaks up the door-way, and the sword that has forced an

entrance before its master: when he shall have sufficiently admired this

wealth of genius, let him fairly say what is the _result_ left on his

mind. Is it an impression of the vileness and worthlessness of his

species? or is not the general feeling which remains, after the

individual faces have ceased to act sensibly on his mind, a _kindly one

in favour of his species_? was not the general air of the whole scene

wholesome? did it do the heart hurt to be among it? Something of a

riotous spirit to be sure is there, some worldly-mindedness in some of

the faces, a Doddingtonian smoothness which does not promise any

superfluous degree of sincerity in the fine gentleman who has been the

occasion of calling so much good company together: but is not the

general cast of expression in the faces, of the good sort? do they not

seem cut out of the _good old rock_, substantial English honesty? would

one fear treachery among characters of their expression? or shall we

call their honest mirth and seldom-returning relaxation by the hard

names of vice and profligacy? That poor country fellow, that is grasping

his staff (which, from that difficulty of feeling themselves at home

which poor men experience at a feast, he has never parted with since he

came into the room), and is enjoying with a relish that seems to fit all

the capacities of his soul the slender joke, which that facetious wag

his neighbour is practising upon the gouty gentleman, whose eyes the

effort to suppress pain has made as round as rings--does it shock the

"dignity of human nature" to look at that man, and to sympathise with

him in the seldom-heard joke which has unbent his care-worn hard-working

visage, and drawn iron smiles from it? or with that full-hearted cobbler

who is honouring with the grasp of an honest fist the unused palm of

that annoyed patrician, whom the license of the time has seated next

him?

I can see nothing "dangerous" in the contemplation of such scenes as

this, or the _Enraged Musician_, or the _Southwark Fair_, or twenty

other pleasant prints which come crowding in upon my recollection, in

which the restless activities, the diversified bents and humours, the

blameless peculiarities of men, as they deserve to be called, rather

than their "vices and follies," are held up in a laughable point of

view. All laughter is not of a dangerous or soul-hardening tendency.

There is the petrifying sneer of a demon which excludes and kills Love,

and there is the cordial laughter of a man which implies and cherishes

it. What heart was ever made the worse by joining in a hearty laugh at

the simplicities of Sir Hugh Evans or Parson Adams, where a sense of the

ridiculous mutually kindles and is kindled by a perception of the

amiable? That tumultuous harmony of singers that are roaring out the

words, "The world shall bow to the Assyrian throne," from the opera of

_Judith_, in the third plate of the series, called the _Four Groups of

Heads_; which the quick eye of Hogarth must have struck off in the very

infancy of the rage for sacred oratorios in this country, while "Music

yet was young;" when we have done smiling at the deafening distortions,

which these tearers of devotion to rags and tatters, these takers of

Heaven by storm, in their boisterous mimicry of the occupation of

angels, are making,--what unkindly impression is left behind, or what

more of harsh or contemptuous feeling, than when we quietly leave Uncle

Toby and Mr. Shandy riding their hobby-horses about the room? The

conceited, long-backed Sign-painter, that with all the self-applause of

a Raphael or Correggio (the twist of body which his conceit has thrown

him into has something of the Correggiesque in it) is contemplating the

picture of a bottle which he is drawing from an actual bottle that hangs

beside him, in the print of _Beer Street_,--while we smile at the

enormity of the self delusion, can we help loving the good humour and

self-complacency of the fellow? would we willingly wake him from his

dream?

I say not that all the ridiculous subjects of Hogarth have necessarily

something in them to make us like them; some are indifferent to us, some

in their natures repulsive, and only made interesting by the wonderful

skill and truth to nature in the painter; but I contend that there is in

most of them that sprinkling of the better nature, which, like holy

water, chases away and disperses the contagion of the bad. They have

this in them besides, that they bring us acquainted with the every-day

human face,--they give us skill to detect those gradations of sense and

virtue (which escape the careless or fastidious observer) in the

countenances of the world about us; and prevent that disgust at common

life, that _tædium quotidianarum formarum_, which an unrestricted

passion for ideal forms and beauties is in danger of producing. In this,

as in many other things, they are analogous to the best novels of

Smollett or Fielding.

ON THE CUSTOM OF HISSING AT THE THEATRES, WITH SOME ACCOUNT OF A CLUB OF

DAMNED AUTHORS

(1811)

Mr. Reflector, I am one of those persons whom the world has thought

proper to designate by the title of Damned Authors. In that memorable

season of dramatic failures, 1806-7, in which no fewer, I think, than

two tragedies, four comedies, one opera, and three farces, suffered at

Drury-lane theatre, I was found guilty of constructing an afterpiece,

and was _damned_.

Against the decision of the public in such instances there can be no

appeal. The Clerk of Chatham might as well have protested against the

decision of Cade and his followers, who were then _the public_. Like him

I was condemned, because I could write.

Not but it did appear to some of us, that the measures of the popular

tribunal at that period savoured a little of harshness and of the

_summum jus_. The public mouth was early in the season fleshed upon the

_Vindictive Man_, and some pieces of that nature, and it retained

through the remainder of it a relish of blood. As Dr. Johnson would have

said; sir, there was a habit of sibilation in the house.

Still less am I disposed to inquire into the reason of the comparative

lenity, on the other hand, with which some pieces were treated, which,

to indifferent judges, seemed at least as much deserving of

condemnation as some of those which met with it. I am willing to put a

favourable construction upon the votes that were given against us; I

believe that there was no bribery or designed partiality in the

case;--only "our nonsense did not happen to suit their nonsense;" that

was all.

But against the _manner_ in which the public on these occasions think

fit to deliver their disapprobation, I must and ever will protest.

Sir, imagine----but you have been present at the damning of a

piece----those who never had that felicity, I beg them to imagine--a

vast theatre, like that which Drury-lane was, before it was a heap of

dust and ashes (I insult not over its fallen greatness, let it recover

itself when it can for me, let it lift up its towering head once more,

and take in poor authors to write for it, hic cœstus artemque repono)--a

theatre like that, filled with all sorts of disgusting sounds,--shrieks,

groans, hisses, but chiefly the last, like the noise of many waters, or

that which Don Quixote heard from the fulling mills, or that wilder

combination of devilish sounds which St. Anthony listened to in the

wilderness.

O, Mr. Reflector, is it not a pity, that the sweet human voice, which

was given man to speak with, to sing with, to whisper tones of love in,

to express compliance, to convey a favour, or to grant a suit--that

voice, which in a Siddons, or a Braham, rouses us, in a Syren Catalani

charms and captivates us,--that the musical, expressive human voice

should be converted into a rival of the noises of silly geese, and

irrational venomous snakes!

I shall never forget the sounds on _my night_; I never before that time

fully felt the reception which the Author of All Ill in the Paradise

Lost meets with from the critics in the _pit_, at the final close of his

Tragedy upon the Human Race--though that, alas! met with too much

success--

----from innumerable tongues,

A dismal universal _hiss_, the sound

Of public scorn.--Dreadful was the din

Of _hissing_ through the hall, thick swarming now

With complicated monsters, head and tail,

Scorpion and asp, and Amphisbœna dire,

Cerastes horn'd, Hydrus, and Elops drear,

And Dipsas.

For hall substitute theatre, and you have the very image of what takes

place at what is called the _damnation_ of a piece,--and properly so

called; for here you see its origin plainly, whence the custom was

derived, and what the first piece was that so suffered. After this none

can doubt the propriety of the appellation.

But, sir, as to the justice of bestowing such appalling, heart-withering

denunciations of the popular obloquy, upon the venial mistake of a poor

author, who thought to please us in the act of filling his pockets,--for

the sum of his demerits amounts to no more than that,--it does, I own,

seem to me a species of retributive justice, far too severe for the

offence. A culprit in the pillory (bate the eggs) meets with no severer

exprobation.

Indeed, I have often wondered that some modest critic has not proposed,

that there should be a wooden machine to that effect erected in some

convenient part of the proscenium, which an unsuccessful author should

be required to mount, and stand his hour, exposed to the apples and

oranges of the pit;--this amende honorable would well suit with the

meanness of some authors, who in their prologues fairly prostrate their

sculls to the Audience, and seem to invite a pelting.

Or why should they not have their pens publicly broke over their heads,

as the swords of recreant knights in old times were, and an oath

administered to them that they should never write again.

Seriously, _Messieurs the Public_, this outrageous way which you have

got of expressing your displeasures, is too much for the occasion. When

I was deafening under the effects of it, I could not help asking, what

crime of great moral turpitude I had committed: for every man about me

seemed to feel the offence as personal to himself, as something which

public interest and private feelings alike called upon him in the

strongest possible manner to stigmatise with infamy.

The Romans, it is well known to you, Mr. Reflector, took a gentler

method of marking their disapprobation of an author's work. They were a

humane and equitable nation.--They left the furca and the patibulum, the

axe and the rods, to great offenders: for these minor, and (if I may so

term them) extra-moral offences, the _bent thumb_ was considered as a

sufficient sign of disapprobation, _vertere pollicem_; as the _pressed

thumb_, _premere pollicem_, was a mark of approving.

And really there seems to have been a sort of fitness in this method, a

correspondency of sign in the punishment to the offence; for as the

action of _writing_ is performed by bending the thumb forward, the

retroversion, or bending back of that joint, did not unaptly point to

the _opposite of that action_, implying, that it was the will of the

audience that the author should _write no more_. A much more

significant, as well as more humane, way of expressing that desire, than

our custom of hissing, which is altogether senseless and indefensible.

Nor do we find that the Roman audiences deprived themselves, by this

lenity, of any tittle of that supremacy which audiences in all ages have

thought themselves bound to maintain over such as have been candidates

for their applause. On the contrary, by this method they seem to have

had the author, as we should express it, completely _under finger and

thumb_.

The provocations to which a dramatic genius is exposed from the public

are so much the more vexatious, as they are removed from any possibility

of retaliation, the hope of which sweetens most other injuries:--for the

public _never writes itself_.--Not but something very like it took place

at the time of the O.P. differences. The placards which were nightly

exhibited, were, properly speaking, the composition of the public.--The

public wrote them, the public applauded them, and precious morceaus of

wit and eloquence they were; except some few, of a better quality, which

it is well known were furnished by professed dramatic writers. After

this specimen of what the public can do for itself, it should be a

little slow in condemning what others do for it.

As the degrees of malignancy vary in people according as they have more

or less of the Old Serpent (the father of hisses) in their composition,

I have sometimes amused myself with analyzing this many-headed hydra,

which calls itself the public, into the component parts of which it is

"complicated, head and tail," and seeing how many varieties of the snake

kind it can afford.

First, there is the Common English Snake.--This is that part of the

auditory who are always the majority at damnations, but who, having no

critical venom in themselves to sting them on, stay till they hear

others hiss, and then join in for company.

The Blind Worm is a species very nearly allied to the foregoing. Some

naturalists have doubted whether they are not the same.

The Rattle Snake.--These are your obstreperous talking critics,--the

impertinent guides of the pit,--who will not give a plain man leave to

enjoy an evening's entertainment, but with their frothy jargon, and

incessant finding of faults, either drown his pleasure quite, or force

him in his own defence to join in their clamorous censure. The hiss

always originates with these. When this creature springs his _rattle_,

you would think, from the noise it makes, there was something in it; but

you have only to examine the instrument from which the noise proceeds,

and you will find it typical of a critic's tongue,--a shallow membrane,

empty, voluble, and seated in the most contemptible part of the

creature's body.

The Whip Snake.--This is he that lashes the poor author the next day in

the newspapers.

The Deaf Adder, or Surda Echidna of Linnæus.--Under this head may be

classed all that portion of the spectators (for audience they properly

are not) who not finding the first act of a piece answer to their

preconceived notions of what a first act should be, like _Obstinate_ in

_John Bunyan_, positively thrust their fingers in their ears, that they

may not hear a word of what is coming, though perhaps the very next act

may be composed in a style as different as possible, and be written

quite to their own tastes. These Adders refuse to hear the voice of the

charmer, because the tuning of his instrument gave them offence.

I should weary you and myself too, if I were to go through all the

classes of the serpent kind. Two qualities are common to them all. They

are creatures of remarkably cold digestions, and chiefly haunt _pits_

and low grounds.

I proceed with more pleasure to give you an account of a Club to which I

have the honour to belong. There are fourteen of us, who are all authors

that have been once in our lives what is called _damned_. We meet on the

anniversaries of our respective nights, and make ourselves merry at the

expence of the public. The chief tenets which distinguish our society,

and which every man among us is bound to hold for gospel, are,--

That the public, or mob, in all ages, have been a set of blind, deaf,

obstinate, senseless, illiterate savages. That no man of genius in his

senses would be ambitious of pleasing such a capricious, ungrateful

rabble. That the only legitimate end of writing for them is to pick

their pockets, and, _that failing_, we are at full liberty to vilify and

abuse them as much as ever we think fit.

That authors, by their affected pretences to humility, which they make

use of as a cloak to insinuate their writings into the callous senses of

the multitude, obtuse to every thing but the grossest flattery, have by

degrees made that great beast their master; as we may act submission to

children till we are obliged to practise it in earnest. That authors are

and ought to be considered the masters and preceptors of the public, and

not _vice versa_. That it was so in the days of Orpheus, Linus, and

Musæus, and would be so again, if it were not that writers prove

traitors to themselves. That in particular, in the days of the first of

those three great authors just mentioned, audiences appear to have been

perfect models of what audiences should be; for though along with the

trees and the rocks and the wild creatures, which he drew after him to

listen to his strains, some serpents doubtless came to hear his music,

it does not appear that any one among them ever lifted up a _dissentient

voice_. They knew what was due to authors in those days. Now every stock

and stone turns into a serpent, and has a voice.

That the terms "Courteous Reader" and "Candid Auditors," as having given

rise to a false notion in those to whom they were applied, as if they

conferred upon them some right, _which they cannot have_, of exercising

their judgments, ought to be utterly banished and exploded.

These are our distinguishing tenets. To keep up the memory of the cause

in which we suffered, as the ancients sacrificed a goat, a supposed

unhealthy animal, to Æsculapius, on our feast-nights we cut up a goose,

an animal typical of the _popular voice_, to the deities of Candour and

Patient Hearing. A zealous member of the society once proposed that we

should revive the obsolete luxury of viper-broth; but the stomachs of

some of the company rising at the proposition, we lost the benefit of

that highly salutary and _antidotal dish_.

The privilege of admission to our club is strictly limited to such as

have been fairly _damned_. A piece that has met with ever so little

applause, that has but languished its night or two, and then gone out,

will never entitle its author to a seat among us. An exception to our

usual readiness in conferring this privilege is, in the case of a

writer, who having been once condemned, writes again, and becomes

candidate for a second martyrdom. Simple damnation we hold to be a

merit, but to be twice-damned we adjudge infamous. Such a one we utterly

reject, and black-ball without a hearing:--

_The common damn'd shun his society._

Hoping that your publication of our Regulations may be a means of

inviting some more members into our society, I conclude this long

letter. I am, Sir, yours,

SEMEL-DAMNATUS.

ON BURIAL SOCIETIES; AND THE CHARACTER OF AN UNDERTAKER

(1811. TEXT OF 1818)

_To the Editor of the Reflector_

Mr. Reflector,--I was amused the other day with having the following

notice thrust into my hand by a man who gives out bills at the corner of

Fleet-market. Whether he saw any prognostics about me, that made him

judge such notice seasonable, I cannot say; I might perhaps carry in a

countenance (naturally not very florid) traces of a fever which had not

long left me. Those fellows have a good instinctive way of guessing at

the sort of people that are likeliest to pay attention to their papers.

"BURIAL SOCIETY

"A favourable opportunity now offers to any person, of either sex,

who would wish to be buried in a genteel manner, by paying one

shilling entrance, and two-pence per week for the benefit of the

stock. Members to be free in six months. The money to be paid at Mr.

Middleton's, at the sign of the _First_ and the _Last_,

Stonecutter's street, Fleet-market. The deceased to be furnished as

follows:--A strong elm coffin, covered with superfine black, and

finished with two rows, all round, close drove, best japanned nails,

and adorned with ornamental drops, a handsome plate of inscription,

Angel above, and Flower beneath, and four pair of handsome handles,

with wrought grips; the coffin to be well pitched, lined, and

ruffled with fine crape; a handsome crape shroud, cap, and pillow.

For use, a handsome velvet pall, three gentlemen's cloaks, three

crape hatbands, three hoods and scarfs, and six pair of gloves; two

porters equipped to attend the funeral, a man to attend the same

with band and gloves; also, the burial fees paid, if not exceeding

one guinea."

"Man," says Sir Thomas Browne, "is a noble animal, splendid in ashes,

and pompous in the grave." Whoever drew up this little advertisement,

certainly understood this appetite in the species, and has made abundant

provision for it. It really almost induces a _tædium vitæ_ upon one to

read it. Methinks I could be willing to die, in death to be so attended.

The two rows all round close-drove best black japanned nails,--how

feelingly do they invite and almost irresistibly persuade us to come and

be fastened down! what aching head can resist the temptation to repose,

which the crape shroud, the cap, and the pillow present; what sting is

there in death, which the handles with wrought gripes are not calculated

to pluck away? what victory in the grave, which the drops and the velvet

pall do not render at least extremely disputable; but above all, the

pretty emblematic plate with the Angel above and the Flower beneath,

takes me mightily.

The notice goes on to inform us, that though the society has been

established but a very few years, upwards of eleven hundred persons have

put down their names. It is really an affecting consideration to think

of so many poor people, of the industrious and hard working class (for

none but such would be possessed of such a generous forethought)

clubbing their twopences to save the reproach of a parish funeral. Many

a poor fellow, I dare swear, has that Angel and Flower kept from the

_Angel_ and _Punchbowl_, while, to provide himself a bier, he has

curtailed himself of _beer_. Many a savory morsel has the living body

been deprived of, that the lifeless one might be served up in a richer

state to the worms. And sure, if the body could understand the actions

of the soul, and entertain generous notions of things, it would thank

its provident partner, that she had been more solicitous to defend it

from dishonours at its dissolution, than careful to pamper it with good

things in the time of its union. If Cæsar were chiefly anxious at his

death how he might die most decently, every Burial Society may be

considered as a Club of Cæsars.

Nothing tends to keep up, in the imaginations of the poorer sort of

people, a generous horror of the workhouse more than the manner in which

pauper funerals are conducted in this metropolis. The coffin nothing but

a few naked planks, coarsely put together,--the want of a pall (that

decent and well-imagined veil, which, hiding the coffin that hides the

body, keeps that which would shock us at two removes from us), the

coloured coats of the men that are hired, at cheap rates, to carry the

body,--altogether, give the notion of the deceased having been some

person of an ill-life and conversation, some one who may not claim the

entire rites of Christian burial,--one by whom some parts of the sacred

ceremony would be desecrated if they should be bestowed upon him. I meet

these meagre processions sometimes in the street. They are sure to make

me out of humour and melancholy all the day after. They have a harsh and

ominous aspect.

If there is anything in the prospectus issued from Mr. Middleton's,

Stonecutter's-street, which pleases me less than the rest, it is to

find, that the six pair of gloves are to be returned, that they are only

lent, or, as the bill expresses it, for use, on the occasion. The hood,

scarfs, and hatbands, may properly enough be given up after the

solemnity: the cloaks no gentleman would think of keeping; but a pair of

gloves, once fitted on, ought not in courtesy to be re-demanded. The

wearer should certainly have the fee-simple of them. The cost would be

but trifling, and they would be a proper memorial of the day. This part

of the Proposal wants reconsidering. It is not conceived in the same

liberal way of thinking as the rest. I am also a little doubtful whether

the limit, within which the burial-fee is made payable, should not be

extended to thirty shillings.

Some provision too ought undoubtedly to be made in favour of those

well-intentioned persons and well-wishers to the fund, who, having all

along paid their subscriptions regularly, are so unfortunate as to die

before the six months, which would entitle them to their freedom, are

quite completed. One can hardly imagine a more distressing case than

that of a poor fellow lingering on in a consumption till the period of

his freedom is almost in sight, and then finding himself going with a

velocity which makes it doubtful whether he shall be entitled to his

funeral honours: his quota to which he nevertheless squeezes out, to the

diminution of the comforts which sickness demands. I think, in such

cases, some of the contribution-money ought to revert. With some such

modifications, which might easily be introduced, I see nothing in these

Proposals of Mr. Middleton which is not strictly fair and genteel; and

heartily recommend them to all persons of moderate incomes, in either

sex, who are willing that this perishable part of them should quit the

scene of its mortal activities, with as handsome circumstances as

possible.

Before I quit the subject, I must guard my readers against a scandal,

which they may be apt to take at the place whence these Proposals

purport to be issued. From the sign of the _First_ and the _Last_, they

may conclude that Mr. Middleton is some publican, who, in assembling a

club of this description at his house, may have a sinister end of his

own, altogether foreign to the solemn purpose for which the club is

pretended to be instituted. I must set them right by informing them that

the issuer of these Proposals is no publican, though he hangs out a

sign, but an honest superintendent of funerals, who, by the device of a

Cradle and a Coffin, connecting both ends of human existence together,

has most ingeniously contrived to insinuate, that the framers of these

_first_ and _last_ receptacles of mankind divide this our life betwixt

them, and that all that passes from the midwife to the undertaker may,

in strict propriety, _go for nothing_: an awful and instructive lesson

to human vanity.

Looking over some papers lately that fell into my hands by chance, and

appear to have been written about the beginning of the last century, I

stumbled, among the rest, upon the following short Essay, which the

writer calls "_The character of an Undertaker_." It is written with some

stiffness and peculiarities of style, but some parts of it, I think, not

unaptly characterise the profession to which Mr. Middleton has the

honour to belong. The writer doubtless had in his mind the entertaining

character of _Sable_, in Steele's excellent comedy of the _Funeral_.

CHARACTER OF AN UNDERTAKER

"He is master of the ceremonies at burials and mourning assemblies,

grand marshal at funeral processions, the only true yeoman of the body,

over which he exercises a dictatorial authority from the moment that the

breath has taken leave to that of its final commitment to the earth. His

ministry begins where the physician's, the lawyer's, and the divine's,

end. Or if some part of the functions of the latter run parallel with

his, it is only _in ordine ad spiritualia_. His temporalities remain

unquestioned. He is arbitrator of all questions of honour which may

concern the defunct; and upon slight inspection will pronounce how long

he may remain in this upper world with credit to himself, and when it

will be prudent for his reputation that he should retire. His

determination in these points is peremptory and without appeal. Yet,

with a modesty peculiar to his profession, he meddles not out of his own

sphere. With the good or bad actions of the deceased in his life-time he

has nothing to do. He leaves the friends of the dead man to form their

own conjectures as to the place to which the departed spirit is gone.

His care is only about the exuviæ. He concerns not himself even about

the body, as it is a structure of parts internal, and a wonderful

microcosm. He leaves such curious speculations to the anatomy professor.

Or, if any thing, he is averse to such wanton enquiries, as delighting

rather that the parts which he has care of should be returned to their

kindred dust in as handsome and unmutilated condition as possible; that

the grave should have its full and unimpaired tribute,--a complete and

just carcass. Nor is he only careful to provide for the body's

entireness, but for its accommodation and ornament. He orders the

fashion of its clothes, and designs the symmetry of its dwelling. Its

vanity has an innocent survival in him. He is bed-maker to the dead. The

pillows which he lays never rumple. The day of interment is the theatre

in which he displays the mysteries of his art. It is hard to describe

what he is, or rather to tell what he is not, on that day: for, being

neither kinsman, servant, nor friend, he is all in turns; a

transcendent, running through all those relations. His office is to

supply the place of self-agency in the family, who are presumed

incapable of it through grief. He is eyes, and ears, and hands, to the

whole household. A draught of wine cannot go round to the mourners, but

he must minister it. A chair may hardly be restored to its place by a

less solemn hand than his. He takes upon himself all functions, and is a

sort of ephemeral major-domo! He distributes his attentions among the

company assembled according to the degree of affliction, which he

calculates from the degree of kin to the deceased; and marshals them

accordingly in the procession. He himself is of a sad and tristful

countenance; yet such as (if well examined) is not without some show of

patience and resignation at bottom: prefiguring, as it were, to the

friends of the deceased, what their grief shall be when the hand of Time

shall have softened and taken down the bitterness of their first

anguish; so handsomely can he fore-shape and anticipate the work of

Time. Lastly, with his wand, as with another divining rod, he calculates

the depth of earth at which the bones of the dead man may rest, which he

ordinarily contrives may be at such a distance from the surface of this

earth, as may frustrate the profane attempts of such as would violate

his repose, yet sufficiently on this side the centre to give his friends

hopes of an easy and practicable resurrection. And here we leave him,

casting in dust to dust, which is the last friendly office that he

_undertakes_ to do."

Begging your pardon for detaining you so long among "graves, and worms,

and epitaphs,"

I am, Sir,

Your humble servant,

MORITORUS.

ON THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKSPEARE, CONSIDERED WITH REFERENCE TO THEIR

FITNESS FOR STAGE REPRESENTATION

(1811. TEXT OF 1818)

Taking a turn the other day in the Abbey, I was struck with the affected

attitude of a figure, which I do not remember to have seen before, and

which upon examination proved to be a whole-length of the celebrated Mr.

Garrick. Though I would not go so far with some good catholics abroad as

to shut players altogether out of consecrated ground, yet I own I was

not a little scandalized at the introduction of theatrical airs and

gestures into a place set apart to remind us of the saddest realities.

Going nearer, I found inscribed under this harlequin figure the

following lines:--

To paint fair Nature, by divine command,

Her magic pencil in his glowing hand,

A Shakspeare rose: then to expand his fame

Wide o'er this breathing world, a Garrick came.

Though sunk in death the forms the Poet drew,

The Actor's genius bade them breathe anew;

Though, like the bard himself, in night they lay,

Immortal Garrick call'd them back to day:

And till ETERNITY with power sublime,

Shall mark the mortal hour of hoary TIME,

SHAKSPEARE and GARRICK like twin stars shall shine,

And earth irradiate with a beam divine.

It would be an insult to my readers' understandings to attempt any thing

like a criticism on this farrago of false thoughts and nonsense. But the

reflection it led me into was a kind of wonder, how, from the days of

the actor here celebrated to our own, it should have been the fashion to

compliment every performer in his turn, that has had the luck to please

the town in any of the great characters of Shakspeare, with the notion

of possessing a _mind congenial with the poet's_: how people should come

thus unaccountably to confound the power of originating poetical images

and conceptions with the faculty of being able to read or recite the

same when put into words;[14] or what connection that absolute mastery

over the heart and soul of man, which a great dramatic poet possesses,

has with those low tricks upon the eye and ear, which a player by

observing a few general effects, which some common passion, as grief,

anger, &c. usually has upon the gestures and exterior, can so easily

compass. To know the internal workings and movements of a great mind, of

an Othello or a Hamlet for instance, the _when_ and the _why_ and the

_how far_ they should be moved; to what pitch a passion is becoming; to

give the reins and to pull in the curb exactly at the moment when the

drawing in or the slackening is most graceful; seems to demand a reach

of intellect of a vastly different extent from that which is employed

upon the bare imitation of the signs of these passions in the

countenance or gesture, which signs are usually observed to be most

lively and emphatic in the weaker sort of minds, and which signs can

after all but indicate some passion, as I said before, anger, or grief,

generally; but of the motives and grounds of the passion, wherein it

differs from the same passion in low and vulgar natures, of these the

actor can give no more idea by his face or gesture than the eye (without

a metaphor) can speak, or the muscles utter intelligible sounds. But

such is the instantaneous nature of the impressions which we take in at

the eye and ear at a playhouse, compared with the slow apprehension

oftentimes of the understanding in reading, that we are apt not only to

sink the play-writer in the consideration which we pay to the actor, but

even to identify in our minds in a perverse manner, the actor with the

character which he represents. It is difficult for a frequent playgoer

to disembarrass the idea of Hamlet from the person and voice of Mr. K.

We speak of Lady Macbeth, while we are in reality thinking of Mrs. S.

Nor is this confusion incidental alone to unlettered persons, who, not

possessing the advantage of reading, are necessarily dependent upon the

stage-player for all the pleasure which they can receive from the drama,

and to whom the very idea of _what an author is_ cannot be made

comprehensible without some pain and perplexity of mind: the error is

one from which persons otherwise not meanly lettered, find it almost

impossible to extricate themselves.

[14] It is observable that we fall into this confusion only in

_dramatic_ recitations. We never dream that the gentleman who reads

Lucretius in public with great applause, is therefore a great poet

and philosopher; nor do we find that Tom Davies, the bookseller, who

is recorded to have recited the Paradise Lost better than any man in

England in his day (though I cannot help thinking there must be some

mistake in this tradition) was therefore, by his intimate friends,

set upon a level with Milton.

Never let me be so ungrateful as to forget the very high degree of

satisfaction which I received some years back from seeing for the first

time a tragedy of Shakspeare performed, in which these two great

performers sustained the principal parts. It seemed to embody and

realize conceptions which had hitherto assumed no distinct shape. But

dearly do we pay all our life after for this juvenile pleasure, this

sense of distinctness. When the novelty is past, we find to our cost

that instead of realizing an idea, we have only materialized and brought

down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood. We have let go a

dream, in quest of an unattainable substance.

How cruelly this operates upon the mind, to have its free conceptions

thus crampt and pressed down to the measure of a strait-lacing

actuality, may be judged from that delightful sensation of freshness,

with which we turn to those plays of Shakspeare which have escaped being

performed, and to those passages in the acting plays of the same writer

which have happily been left out in performance. How far the very custom

of hearing any thing _spouted_, withers and blows upon a fine passage,

may be seen in those speeches from Henry the Fifth, &c. which are

current in the mouths of school-boys from their being to be found in

_Enfield Speakers_, and such kind of books. I confess myself utterly

unable to appreciate that celebrated soliloquy in Hamlet, beginning "To

be or not to be," or to tell whether it be good, bad, or indifferent, it

has been so handled and pawed about by declamatory boys and men, and

torn so inhumanly from its living place and principle of continuity in

the play, till it is become to me a perfect dead member.

It may seem a paradox, but I cannot help being of opinion that the plays

of Shakspeare are less calculated for performance on a stage, than those

of almost any other dramatist whatever. Their distinguished excellence

is a reason that they should be so. There is so much in them, which

comes not under the province of acting, with which eye, and tone, and

gesture, have nothing to do.

The glory of the scenic art is to personate passion, and the turns of

passion; and the more coarse and palpable the passion is, the more hold

upon the eyes and ears of the spectators the performer obviously

possesses. For this reason, scolding scenes, scenes where two persons

talk themselves into a fit of fury, and then in a surprising manner talk

themselves out of it again, have always been the most popular upon our

stage. And the reason is plain, because the spectators are here most

palpably appealed to, they are the proper judges in this war of words,

they are the legitimate ring that should be formed round such

"intellectual prize-fighters." Talking is the direct object of the

imitation here. But in all the best dramas, and in Shakspeare above all,

how obvious it is, that the form of _speaking_, whether it be in

soliloquy or dialogue, is only a medium, and often a highly artificial

one, for putting the reader or spectator into possession of that

knowledge of the inner structure and workings of mind in a character,

which he could otherwise never have arrived at _in that form of

composition_ by any gift short of intuition. We do here as we do with

novels written in the _epistolary form_. How many improprieties, perfect

solecisms in letter-writing, do we put up with in Clarissa and other

books, for the sake of the delight which that form upon the whole gives

us.

But the practice of stage representation reduces every thing to a

controversy of elocution. Every character, from the boisterous

blasphemings of Bajazet to the shrinking timidity of womanhood, must

play the orator. The love-dialogues of Romeo and Juliet, those

silver-sweet sounds of lovers' tongues by night; the more intimate and

sacred sweetness of nuptial colloquy between an Othello or a Posthumus

with their married wives, all those delicacies which are so delightful

in the reading, as when we read of those youthful dalliances in

Paradise--

As beseem'd

Fair couple link'd in happy nuptial league,

Alone:

by the inherent fault of stage representation, how are these things

sullied and turned from their very nature by being exposed to a large

assembly; when such speeches as Imogen addresses to her lord, come

drawling out of the mouth of a hired actress, whose courtship, though

nominally addressed to the personated Posthumus, is manifestly aimed at

the spectators, who are to judge of her endearments and her returns of

love.

The character of Hamlet is perhaps that by which, since the days of

Betterton, a succession of popular performers have had the greatest

ambition to distinguish themselves. The length of the part may be one of

their reasons. But for the character itself, we find it in a play, and

therefore we judge it a fit subject of dramatic representation. The play

itself abounds in maxims and reflexions beyond any other, and therefore

we consider it as a proper vehicle for conveying moral instruction. But

Hamlet himself--what does he suffer meanwhile by being dragged forth as

a public schoolmaster, to give lectures to the crowd! Why, nine parts in

ten of what Hamlet does, are transactions between himself and his moral

sense, they are the effusions of his solitary musings, which he retires

to holes and corners and the most sequestered parts of the palace to

pour forth; or rather, they are the silent meditations with which his

bosom is bursting, reduced to _words_ for the sake of the reader, who

must else remain ignorant of what is passing there. These profound

sorrows, these light-and-noise-abhorring ruminations, which the tongue

scarce dares utter to deaf walls and chambers, how can they be

represented by a gesticulating actor, who comes and mouths them out

before an audience, making four hundred people his confidants at once? I

say not that it is the fault of the actors so to do; he must pronounce

them _ore rotundo_, he must accompany them with his eye, he must

insinuate them into his auditory by some trick of eye, tone, or gesture,

or he fails. _He must be thinking all the while of his appearance,

because he knows that all the while the spectators are judging of it._

And this is the way to represent the shy, negligent, retiring Hamlet.

It is true that there is no other mode of conveying a vast quantity of

thought and feeling to a great portion of the audience, who otherwise

would never earn it for themselves by reading, and the intellectual

acquisition gained this way may, for aught I know, be inestimable; but I

am not arguing that Hamlet should not be acted, but how much Hamlet is

made another thing by being acted. I have heard much of the wonders

which Garrick performed in this part; but as I never saw him, I must

have leave to doubt whether the representation of such a character came

within the province of his art. Those who tell me of him, speak of his

eye, of the magic of his eye, and of his commanding voice: physical

properties, vastly desirable in an actor, and without which he can never

insinuate meaning into an auditory,--but what have they to do with

Hamlet? what have they to do with intellect? In fact, the things aimed

at in theatrical representation, are to arrest the spectator's eye upon

the form and the gesture, and so to gain a more favourable hearing to

what is spoken: it is not what the character is, but how he looks; not

what he says, but how he speaks it. I see no reason to think that if the

play of Hamlet were written over again by some such writer as Banks or

Lillo, retaining the process of the story, but totally omitting all the

poetry of it, all the divine features of Shakspeare, his stupendous

intellect; and only taking care to give us enough of passionate

dialogue, which Banks or Lillo were never at a loss to furnish; I see

not how the effect could be much different upon an audience, nor how the

actor has it in his power to represent Shakspeare to us differently from

his representation of Banks or Lillo. Hamlet would still be a youthful

accomplished prince, and must be gracefully personated; he might be

puzzled in his mind, wavering in his conduct, seemingly-cruel to

Ophelia, he might see a ghost, and start at it, and address it kindly

when he found it to be his father; all this in the poorest and most

homely language of the servilest creeper after nature that ever

consulted the palate of an audience; without troubling Shakspeare for

the matter: and I see not but there would be room for all the power

which an actor has, to display itself. All the passions and changes of

passion might remain: for those are much less difficult to write or act

than is thought, it is a trick easy to be attained, it is but rising or

falling a note or two in the voice, a whisper with a significant

foreboding look to announce its approach, and so contagious the

counterfeit appearance of any emotion is, that let the words be what

they will, the look and tone shall carry it off and make it pass for

deep skill in the passions.

It is common for people to talk of Shakspeare's plays being _so

natural_; that every body can understand him. They are natural indeed,

they are grounded deep in nature, so deep that the depth of them lies

out of the reach of most of us. You shall hear the same persons say that

George Barnwell is very natural, and Othello is very natural, that they

are both very deep; and to them they are the same kind of thing. At the

one they sit and shed tears, because a good sort of young man is tempted

by a naughty woman to commit a _trifling peccadillo_, the murder of an

uncle or so,[15] that is all, and so comes to an untimely end, which is

_so moving_; and at the other, because a blackamoor in a fit of jealousy

kills his innocent white wife: and the odds are that ninety-nine out of

a hundred would willingly behold the same catastrophe happen to both the

heroes, and have thought the rope more due to Othello than to Barnwell.

For of the texture of Othello's mind, the inward construction

marvellously laid open with all its strengths and weaknesses, its heroic

confidences and its human misgivings, its agonies of hate springing from

the depths of love, they see no more than the spectators at a cheaper

rate, who pay their pennies a-piece to look through the man's telescope

in Leicester-fields, see into the inward plot and topography of the

moon. Some dim thing or other they see, they see an actor personating a

passion, of grief, or anger, for instance, and they recognize it as a

copy of the usual external effects of such passions; or at least as

being true to _that symbol of the emotion which passes current at the

theatre for it_, for it is often no more than that: but of the grounds

of the passion, its correspondence to a great or heroic nature, which is

the only worthy object of tragedy,--that common auditors know any thing

of this, or can have any such notions dinned into them by the mere

strength of an actor's lungs,--that apprehensions foreign to them should

be thus infused into them by storm, I can neither believe, nor

understand how it can be possible.

[15] If this note could hope to meet the eye of any of the Managers,

I would entreat and beg of them, in the name of both the Galleries,

that this insult upon the morality of the common people of London

should cease to be eternally repeated in the holiday weeks. Why are

the 'Prentices of this famous and well-governed city, instead of an

amusement, to be treated over and over again with the nauseous

sermon of George Barnwell? Why _at the end of their vistoes_

[_vistas_] are we to place the _gallows_? Were I an uncle, I should

not much like a nephew of mine to have such an example placed before

his eyes. It is really making uncle-murder too trivial to exhibit it

as done upon such slight motives;--it is attributing too much to

such characters as Millwood;--it is putting things into the heads of

good young men, which they would never otherwise have dreamed of.

Uncles that think any thing of their lives, should fairly petition

the Chamberlain against it.

We talk of Shakspeare's admirable observation of life, when we should

feel, that not from a petty inquisition into those cheap and every-day

characters which surrounded him, as they surround us, but from his own

mind, which was, to borrow a phrase of Ben Jonson's, the very "sphere of

humanity," he fetched those images of virtue and of knowledge, of which

every one of us recognizing a part, think we comprehend in our natures

the whole; and oftentimes mistake the powers which he positively creates

in us, for nothing more than indigenous faculties of our own minds,

which only waited the application of corresponding virtues in him to

return a full and clear echo of the same.

To return to Hamlet.--Among the distinguishing features of that

wonderful character, one of the most interesting (yet painful) is that

soreness of mind which makes him treat the intrusions of Polonius with

harshness, and that asperity which he puts on in his interviews with

Ophelia. These tokens of an unhinged mind (if they be not mixed in the

latter case with a profound artifice of love, to alienate Ophelia by

affected discourtesies, so to prepare her mind for the breaking off of

that loving intercourse, which can no longer find a place amidst

business so serious as that which he has to do) are parts of his

character, which to reconcile with our admiration of Hamlet, the most

patient consideration of his situation is no more than necessary; they

are what we _forgive afterwards_, and explain by the whole of his

character, but _at the time_ they are harsh and unpleasant. Yet such is

the actor's necessity of giving strong blows to the audience, that I

have never seen a player in this character, who did not exaggerate and

strain to the utmost these ambiguous features,--these temporary

deformities in the character. They make him express a vulgar scorn at

Polonius which utterly degrades his gentility, and which no explanation

can render palateable; they make him shew contempt, and curl up the nose

at Ophelia's father,--contempt in its very grossest and most hateful

form; but they get applause by it: it is natural, people say; that is,

the words are scornful, and the actor expresses scorn, and that they can

judge of: but why so much scorn, and of that sort, they never think of

asking.

So to Ophelia.--All the Hamlets that I have ever seen, rant and rave at

her as if she had committed some great crime, and the audience are

highly pleased, because the words of the part are satirical, and they

are enforced by the strongest expression of satirical indignation of

which the face and voice are capable. But then, whether Hamlet is likely

to have put on such brutal appearances to a lady whom he loved so

dearly, is never thought on. The truth is, that in all such deep

affections as had subsisted between Hamlet and Ophelia, there is a stock

of _supererogatory love_, (if I may venture to use the expression) which

in any great grief of heart, especially where that which preys upon the

mind cannot be communicated, confers a kind of indulgence upon the

grieved party to express itself, even to its heart's dearest object, in

the language of a temporary alienation; but it is not alienation, it is

a distraction purely, and so it always makes itself to be felt by that

object: it is not anger, but grief assuming the appearance of

anger,--love awkwardly counterfeiting hate, as sweet countenances when

they try to frown: but such sternness and fierce disgust as Hamlet is

made to shew, is no counterfeit, but the real face of absolute

aversion,--of irreconcileable alienation. It may be said he puts on the

madman; but then he should only so far put on this counterfeit lunacy as

his own real distraction will give him leave; that is, incompletely,

imperfectly; not in that confirmed, practised way, like a master of his

art, or, as Dame Quickly would say, "like one of those harlotry

players."

I mean no disrespect to any actor, but the sort of pleasure which

Shakspeare's plays give in the acting seems to me not at all to differ

from that which the audience receive from those of other writers; and,

_they being in themselves essentially so different from all others_, I

must conclude that there is something in the nature of acting which

levels all distinctions. And in fact, who does not speak indifferently

of the Gamester and of Macbeth as fine stage performances, and praise

the Mrs. Beverley in the same way as the Lady Macbeth of Mrs. S.?

Belvidera, and Calista, and Isabella, and Euphrasia, are they less liked

than Imogen, or than Juliet, or than Desdemona? Are they not spoken of

and remembered in the same way? Is not the female performer as great (as

they call it) in one as in the other? Did not Garrick shine, and was he

not ambitious of shining in every drawling tragedy that his wretched day

produced,--the productions of the Hills and the Murphys and the

Browns,--and shall he have that honour to dwell in our minds for ever as

an inseparable concomitant with Shakspeare? A kindred mind! O who can

read that affecting sonnet of Shakspeare which alludes to his profession

as a player:--

Oh for my sake do you with Fortune chide,

The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,

That did not better for my life provide

Than public means which public custom [manners] breeds--

Thence comes it that my name receives a brand;

And almost thence my nature is subdued

To what it works in, like the dyer's hand--

Or that other confession:--

Alas! 'tis true, I have gone here and there,

And made myself a motly to thy view,

Gor'd mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear--

Who can read these instances of jealous self-watchfulness in our sweet

Shakspeare, and dream of any congeniality between him and one that, by

every tradition of him, appears to have been as mere a player as ever

existed; to have had his mind tainted with the lowest players'

vices,--envy and jealousy, and miserable cravings after applause; one

who in the exercise of his profession was jealous even of the

women-performers that stood in his way; a manager full of managerial

tricks and stratagems and finesse: that any resemblance should be

dreamed of between him and Shakspeare,--Shakspeare who, in the plenitude

and consciousness of his own powers, could with that noble modesty,

which we can neither imitate nor appreciate, express himself thus of his

own sense of his own defects:--

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featur'd like him, like him with friends possest;

Desiring _this man's art, and that man's scope_.

I am almost disposed to deny to Garrick the merit of being an admirer of

Shakspeare. A true lover of his excellencies he certainly was not; for

would any true lover of them have admitted into his matchless scenes

such ribald trash as Tate and Cibber, and the rest of them, that

With their darkness durst affront his light,

have foisted into the acting plays of Shakspeare? I believe it

impossible that he could have had a proper reverence for Shakspeare, and

have condescended to go through that interpolated scene in Richard the

Third, in which Richard tries to break his wife's heart by telling her

he loves another woman, and says, "if she survives this she is

immortal." Yet I doubt not he delivered this vulgar stuff with as much

anxiety of emphasis as any of the genuine parts; and for acting, it is

as well calculated as any. But we have seen the part of Richard lately

produce great fame to an actor by his manner of playing it, and it lets

us into the secret of acting, and of popular judgments of Shakspeare

derived from acting. Not one of the spectators who have witnessed Mr.

C.'s exertions in that part, but has come away with a proper conviction

that Richard is a very wicked man, and kills little children in their

beds, with something like the pleasure which the giants and ogres in

children's books are represented to have taken in that practice;

moreover, that he is very close and shrewd and devilish cunning, for you

could see that by his eye.

But is in fact this the impression we have in reading the Richard of

Shakspeare? Do we feel any thing like disgust, as we do at that

butcher-like representation of him that passes for him on the stage? A

horror at his crimes blends with the effect which we feel, but how is it

qualified, how is it carried off, by the rich intellect which he

displays, his resources, his wit, his buoyant spirits, his vast

knowledge and insight into characters, the poetry of his part,--not an

atom of all which is made perceivable in Mr. C.'s way of acting it.

Nothing but his crimes, his actions, is visible; they are prominent and

staring; the murderer stands out, but where is the lofty genius, the man

of vast capacity,--the profound, the witty, accomplished Richard?

The truth is, the Characters of Shakspeare are so much the objects of

meditation rather than of interest or curiosity as to their

actions, that while we are reading any of his great criminal

characters,--Macbeth, Richard, even Iago,--we think not so much of the

crimes which they commit, as of the ambition, the aspiring spirit, the

intellectual activity, which prompts them to overleap those moral

fences. Barnwell is a wretched murderer; there is a certain fitness

between his neck and the rope; he is the legitimate heir to the gallows;

nobody who thinks at all can think of any alleviating circumstances in

his case to make him a fit object of mercy. Or to take an instance from

the higher tragedy, what else but a mere assassin is Glenalvon! Do we

think of any thing but of the crime which he commits, and the rack which

he deserves? That is all which we really think about him. Whereas in

corresponding characters in Shakspeare so little do the actions

comparatively affect us, that while the impulses, the inner mind in all

its perverted greatness, solely seems real and is exclusively attended

to, the crime is comparatively nothing. But when we see these things

represented, the acts which they do are comparatively every thing, their

impulses nothing. The state of sublime emotion into which we are

elevated by those images of night and horror which Macbeth is made to

utter, that solemn prelude with which he entertains the time till the

bell shall strike which is to call him to murder Duncan,--when we no

longer read it in a book, when we have given up that vantage-ground of

abstraction which reading possesses over seeing, and come to see a man

in his bodily shape before our eyes actually preparing to commit a

murder, if the acting be true and impressive, as I have witnessed it in

Mr. K.'s performance of that part, the painful anxiety about the act,

the natural longing to prevent it while it yet seems unperpetrated, the

too close pressing semblance of reality, give a pain and an uneasiness

which totally destroy all the delight which the words in the book

convey, where the deed doing never presses upon us with the painful

sense of presence: it rather seems to belong to history,--to something

past and inevitable, if it has any thing to do with time at all. The

sublime images, the poetry alone, is that which is present to our minds

in the reading.

So to see Lear acted,--to see an old man tottering about the stage with

a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy night,

has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting. We want to take

him into shelter and relieve him. That is all the feeling which the

acting of Lear ever produced in me. But the Lear of Shakspeare cannot be

acted. The contemptible machinery by which they mimic the storm which he

goes out in, is not more inadequate to represent the horrors of the real

elements, than any actor can be to represent Lear: they might more

easily propose to personate the Satan of Milton upon a stage, or one of

Michael Angelo's terrible figures. The greatness of Lear is not in

corporal dimension, but in intellectual: the explosions of his passion

are terrible as a volcano: they are storms turning up and disclosing to

the bottom that sea, his mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind

which is laid bare. This case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant

to be thought on; even as he himself neglects it. On the stage we see

nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage;

while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear,--we are in his mind,

we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of daughters and

storms; in the aberrations of his reason, we discover a mighty irregular

power of reasoning, immethodized from the ordinary purposes of life, but

exerting its powers, as the wind blows where it listeth, at will upon

the corruptions and abuses of mankind. What have looks, or tones, to do

with that sublime identification of his age with that of the _heavens

themselves_, when in his reproaches to them for conniving at the

injustice of his children, he reminds them that "they themselves are

old." What gesture shall we appropriate to this? What has the voice or

the eye to do with such things? But the play is beyond all art, as the

tamperings with it shew: it is too hard and stony; it must have

love-scenes, and a happy ending. It is not enough that Cordelia is a

daughter, she must shine as a lover too. Tate has put his hook in the

nostrils of this Leviathan, for Garrick and his followers, the showmen

of the scene, to draw the mighty beast about more easily. A happy

ending!--as if the living martyrdom that Lear had gone through,--the

flaying of his feelings alive, did not make a fair dismissal from the

stage of life the only decorous thing for him. If he is to live and be

happy after, if he could sustain this world's burden after, why all this

pudder and preparation,--why torment us with all this unnecessary

sympathy? As if the childish pleasure of getting his gilt robes and

sceptre again could tempt him to act over again his misused station,--as

if at his years, and with his experience, any thing was left but to die.

Lear is essentially impossible to be represented on a stage. But how

many dramatic personages are there in Shakspeare, which though more

tractable and feasible (if I may so speak) than Lear, yet from some

circumstance, some adjunct to their character, are improper to be shewn

to our bodily eye. Othello for instance. Nothing can be more soothing,

more flattering to the nobler parts of our natures, than to read of a

young Venetian lady of highest extraction, through the force of love and

from a sense of merit in him whom she loved, laying aside every

consideration of kindred, and country, and colour, and wedding with a

_coal-black Moor_--(for such he is represented, in the imperfect state

of knowledge respecting foreign countries in those days, compared with

our own, or in compliance with popular notions, though the Moors are now

well enough known to be by many shades less unworthy of a white woman's

fancy)--it is the perfect triumph of virtue over accidents, of the

imagination over the senses. She sees Othello's colour in his mind. But

upon the stage, when the imagination is no longer the ruling faculty,

but we are left to our poor unassisted senses, I appeal to every one

that has seen Othello played, whether he did not, on the contrary, sink

Othello's mind in his colour; whether he did not find something

extremely revolting in the courtship and wedded caresses of Othello and

Desdemona; and whether the actual sight of the thing did not over-weigh

all that beautiful compromise which we make in reading;--and the reason

it should do so is obvious, because there is just so much reality

presented to our senses as to give a perception of disagreement, with

not enough of belief in the internal motives,--all that which is

unseen,--to overpower and reconcile the first and obvious

prejudices.[16] What we see upon a stage is body and bodily action; what

we are conscious of in reading is almost exclusively the mind, and its

movements: and this I think may sufficiently account for the very

different sort of delight with which the same play so often affects us

in the reading and the seeing.

[16] The error of supposing that because Othello's colour does not

offend us in the reading, it should also not offend us in the

seeing, is just such a fallacy as supposing that an Adam and Eve in

a picture shall affect us just as they do in the poem. But in the

poem we for a while have Paradisaical senses given us, which vanish

when we see a man and his wife without clothes in the picture. The

painters themselves feel this, as is apparent by the aukward shifts

they have recourse to, to make them look not quite naked; by a sort

of prophetic anachronism, antedating the invention of fig-leaves. So

in the reading of the play, we see with Desdemona's eyes; in the

seeing of it, we are forced to look with our own.

It requires little reflection to perceive, that if those characters in

Shakspeare which are within the precincts of nature, have yet something

in them which appeals too exclusively to the imagination, to admit of

their being made objects to the senses without suffering a change and a

diminution,--that still stronger the objection must lie against

representing another line of characters, which Shakspeare has introduced

to give a wildness and a supernatural elevation to his scenes, as if to

remove them still farther from that assimilation to common life in which

their excellence is vulgarly supposed to consist. When we read the

incantations of those terrible beings the Witches in Macbeth, though

some of the ingredients of their hellish composition savour of the

grotesque, yet is the effect upon us other than the most serious and

appalling that can be imagined? Do we not feel spell-bound as Macbeth

was? Can any mirth accompany a sense of their presence? We might as well

laugh under a consciousness of the principle of Evil himself being truly

and really present with us. But attempt to bring these beings on to a

stage, and you turn them instantly into so many old women, that men and

children are to laugh at. Contrary to the old saying, that "seeing is

believing," the sight actually destroys the faith; and the mirth in

which we indulge at their expense, when we see these creatures upon a

stage, seems to be a sort of indemnification which we make to ourselves

for the terror which they put us in when reading made them an object of

belief,--when we surrendered up our reason to the poet, as children to

their nurses and their elders; and we laugh at our fears, as children

who thought they saw something in the dark, triumph when the bringing in

of a candle discovers the vanity of their fears. For this exposure of

supernatural agents upon a stage is truly bringing in a candle to expose

their own delusiveness. It is the solitary taper and the book that

generates a faith in these terrors: a ghost by chandelier light, and in

good company, deceives no spectators,--a ghost that can be measured by

the eye, and his human dimensions made out at leisure. The sight of a

well-lighted house, and a well-dressed audience, shall arm the most

nervous child against any apprehensions: as Tom Brown says of the

impenetrable skin of Achilles with his impenetrable armour over it,

"Bully Dawson would have fought the devil with such advantages."

Much has been said, and deservedly, in reprobation of the vile mixture

which Dryden has thrown into the Tempest: doubtless without some such

vicious alloy, the impure ears of that age would never have sate out to

hear so much innocence of love as is contained in the sweet courtship of

Ferdinand and Miranda. But is the Tempest of Shakspeare at all a subject

for stage representation? It is one thing to read of an enchanter, and

to believe the wondrous tale while we are reading it; but to have a

conjuror brought before us in his conjuring-gown, with his spirits about

him, which none but himself and some hundred of favoured spectators

before the curtain are supposed to see, involves such a quantity of the

_hateful incredible_, that all our reverence for the author cannot

hinder us from perceiving such gross attempts upon the senses to be in

the highest degree childish and inefficient. Spirits and fairies cannot

be represented, they cannot even be painted,--they can only be believed.

But the elaborate and anxious provision of scenery, which the luxury of

the age demands, in these cases works a quite contrary effect to what is

intended. That which in comedy, or plays of familiar life, adds so much

to the life of the imitation, in plays which appeal to the higher

faculties, positively destroys the illusion which it is introduced to

aid. A parlour or a drawing-room,--a library opening into a garden,--a

garden with an alcove in it,--a street, or the piazza of Covent-garden,

does well enough in a scene; we are content to give as much credit to it

as it demands; or rather, we think little about it,--it is little more

than reading at the top of a page, "Scene, a Garden;" we do not imagine

ourselves there, but we readily admit the imitation of familiar objects.

But to think by the help of painted trees and caverns, which we know to

be painted, to transport our minds to Prospero, and his island and his

lonely cell[17]; or by the aid of a fiddle dexterously thrown in, in an

interval of speaking, to make us believe that we hear those supernatural

noises of which the isle was full:--the Orrery Lecturer at the Haymarket

might as well hope, by his musical glasses cleverly stationed out of

sight behind his apparatus, to make us believe that we do indeed hear

the chrystal spheres ring out that chime, which if it were to inwrap our

fancy long, Milton thinks,

Time would run back and fetch the age of gold,

And speckled vanity

Would sicken soon and die,

And leprous Sin would melt from earthly mould;

Yea Hell itself would pass away,

And leave its dolorous mansions to the peering day.

[17] It will be said these things are done in pictures. But pictures

and scenes are very different things. Painting is a world of itself,

but in scene-painting there is the attempt to deceive; and there is

the discordancy, never to be got over, between painted scenes and

real people.

The Garden of Eden, with our first parents in it, is not more impossible

to be shewn on a stage, than the Enchanted Isle, with its no less

interesting and innocent first settlers.

The subject of Scenery is closely connected with that of the Dresses,

which are so anxiously attended to on our stage. I remember the last

time I saw Macbeth played, the discrepancy I felt at the changes of

garment which he varied,--the shiftings and re-shiftings, like a Romish

priest at mass. The luxury of stage-improvements, and the importunity of

the public eye, require this. The coronation robe of the Scottish

monarch was fairly a counterpart to that which our King wears when he

goes to the Parliament-house,--just so full and cumbersome, and set out

with ermine and pearls. And if things must be represented, I see not

what to find fault with in this. But in reading, what robe are we

conscious of? Some dim images of royalty--a crown and sceptre, may

float before our eyes, but who shall describe the fashion of it? Do we

see in our mind's eye that Webb or any other robe-maker could pattern?

This is the inevitable consequence of imitating every thing, to make all

things natural. Whereas the reading of a tragedy is a fine abstraction.

It presents to the fancy just so much of external appearances as to make

us feel that we are among flesh and blood, while by far the greater and

better part of our imagination is employed upon the thoughts and

internal machinery of the character. But in acting, scenery, dress, the

most contemptible things, call upon us to judge of their naturalness.

Perhaps it would be no bad similitude, to liken the pleasure which we

take in seeing one of these fine plays acted, compared with that quiet

delight which we find in the reading of it, to the different feelings

with which a reviewer, and a man that is not a reviewer, reads a fine

poem. The accursed critical habit,--the being called upon to judge and

pronounce, must make it quite a different thing to the former. In seeing

these plays acted, we are affected just as judges. When Hamlet compares

the two pictures of Gertrude's first and second husband, who wants to

see the pictures? But in the acting, a miniature must be lugged out;

which we know not to be the picture, but only to shew how finely a

miniature may be represented. This shewing of every thing, levels all

things: it makes tricks, bows, and curtesies, of importance. Mrs. S.

never got more fame by any thing than by the manner in which she

dismisses the guests in the banquet-scene in Macbeth: it is as much

remembered as any of her thrilling tones or impressive looks. But does

such a trifle as this enter into the imaginations of the readers of that

wild and wonderful scene? Does not the mind dismiss the feasters as

rapidly as it can? Does it care about the gracefulness of the doing it?

But by acting, and judging of acting, all these non-essentials are

raised into an importance, injurious to the main interest of the play.

I have confined my observations to the tragic parts of Shakspeare. It

would be no very difficult task to extend the enquiry to his comedies;

and to shew why Falstaff, Shallow, Sir Hugh Evans, and the rest, are

equally incompatible with stage representation. The length to which

this Essay has run, will make it, I am afraid, sufficiently distasteful

to the Amateurs of the Theatre, without going any deeper into the

subject at present.

SPECIMENS FROM THE WRITINGS OF FULLER, THE CHURCH HISTORIAN

(1811. TEXT OF 1818)

The writings of Fuller are usually designated by the title of quaint,

and with sufficient reason; for such was his natural bias to conceits,

that I doubt not upon most occasions it would have been going out of his

way to have expressed himself out of them. But his wit is not always a

_lumen siccum_, a dry faculty of surprising; on the contrary, his

conceits are oftentimes deeply steeped in human feeling and passion.

Above all, his way of telling a story, for its eager liveliness, and the

perpetual running commentary of the narrator happily blended with the

narration, is perhaps unequalled.

As his works are now scarcely perused but by antiquaries, I thought it

might not be unacceptable to my readers to present them with some

specimens of his manner, in single thoughts and phrases; and in some few

passages of greater length, chiefly of a narrative description. I shall

arrange them as I casually find them in my book of extracts, without

being solicitous to specify the particular work from which they are

taken.

_Pyramids._--"The Pyramids themselves, doting with age, have forgotten

the names of their founders."

_Virtue in a short person._--"His soul had but a short diocese to visit,

and therefore might the better attend the effectual informing thereof."

_Intellect in a very tall one._--"Oft times such who are built four

stories high, are observed to have little in their cock-loft."

_Naturals._--"Their heads sometimes so little, that there is no room for

wit; sometimes so long, that there is no wit for so much room."

_Negroes._--"The image of God cut in ebony."

_School-divinity._--"At the first it will be as welcome to thee as a

prison, and their very solutions will seem knots unto thee."

_Mr. Perkins, the Divine._--"He had a capacious head, with angles

winding and roomy enough to lodge all controversial intricacies."

_The same._--"He would pronounce the word _Damn_ with such an emphasis

as left a doleful echo in his auditors' ears a good while after."

_Judges in capital cases._--"O let him take heed how he strikes, that

hath a dead hand."

_Memory._--"Philosophers place it in the rear of the head, and it seems

the mine of memory lies there, because there men naturally dig for it,

scratching it when they are at a loss."

_Fancy._--"It is the most boundless and restless faculty of the soul;

for while the Understanding and the Will are kept, as it were, _in

libera custodia_ to their objects of _verum et bonum_, the Fancy is free

from all engagements: it digs without spade, sails without ship, flies

without wings, builds without charges, fights without bloodshed; in a

moment striding from the centre to the circumference of the world; by a

kind of omnipotency creating and annihilating things in an instant; and

things divorced in Nature are married in Fancy as in a lawless place."

_Infants._--"Some, admiring what motives to mirth infants meet with in

their silent and solitary smiles, have resolved, how truly I know not,

that then they converse with angels; as indeed such cannot among mortals

find any fitter companions."

_Music._--"Such is the sociableness of music, it conforms itself to all

companies both in mirth and mourning; complying to improve that passion

with which it finds the auditors most affected. In a word, it is an

invention which might have beseemed a son of Seth to have been the

father thereof: though better it was that Cain's great grandchild should

have the credit first to find it, than the world the unhappiness longer

to have wanted it."

_St. Monica._--"Drawing near her death, she sent most pious thoughts as

harbingers to heaven, and her soul saw a glimpse of happiness through

the chinks of her sickness-broken body."[18]

[18]

The soul's dark cottage, batter'd and decay'd,

Lets in new lights through chinks which time has made.--WALLER.

_Mortality._--"To smell to a turf of fresh earth is wholesome for the

body, no less are thoughts of mortality cordial to the soul."

_Virgin._--"No lordling husband shall at the same time command her

presence and distance; to be always near in constant attendance, and

always to stand aloof in awful observance."

_Elder Brother._--"Is one who made haste to come into the world to bring

his parents the first news of male posterity, and is well rewarded for

his tidings."

_Bishop Fletcher._--"His pride was rather on him than in him, as only

gait and gesture deep, not sinking to his heart, though causelessly

condemned for a proud man, as who was a _good hypocrite_, and far more

humble than he appeared."

_Masters of Colleges._--"A little alloy of dulness in a Master of a

College makes him fitter to manage secular affairs."

_The Good Yeoman._--"Is a gentleman in ore, whom the next age may see

refined."

_Good Parent._--"For his love, therein, like a well drawn picture, he

eyes all his children alike."

_Deformity in Children._--"This partiality is tyranny, when parents

despise those that are deformed; _enough to break those whom God had

bowed before_."

_Good Master._--"In correcting his servant he becomes not a slave to his

own passion. Not cruelly making new _indentures_ of the flesh of his

apprentice. He is tender of his servant in sickness and age. If crippled

in his service, his house is his hospital. Yet how many throw away those

dry bones, out of the which themselves have sucked the marrow!"

_Good Widow._--"If she can speak but little good of him [her dead

husband] she speaks but little of him. So handsomely folding up her

discourse, that his virtues are shewn outwards, and his vices wrapped up

in silence; as counting it barbarism to throw dirt on his memory who

hath moulds cast on his body."

_Horses._--"These are men's wings, wherewith they make such speed. A

generous creature a horse is, sensible in some sort of honour; and made

most handsome by that which deforms men most--pride."

_Martyrdom._--"Heart of oak hath sometime warped a little in the

scorching heat of persecution. Their want of true courage herein cannot

be excused. Yet many censure them for surrendering up their forts after

a long siege, who would have yielded up their own at the first summons.

Oh! there is more required to make one valiant, than to call Cranmer or

Jewel coward; as if the fire in Smithfield had been no hotter than what

is painted in the Book of Martyrs."

_Text of St. Paul._--"St. Paul saith, let not the sun go down on your

wrath, to carry news to the antipodes in another world of thy revengeful

nature. Yet let us take the Apostle's meaning rather than his words,

with all possible speed to depose our passion; not understanding him so

literally, that we may take leave to be angry till sunset: then might

our wrath lengthen with the days; and men in Greenland, where the day

lasts above a quarter of a year, have plentiful scope for revenge."[19]

[19] This whimsical prevention of a consequence which no one would

have thought of deducing,--setting up an absurdum on purpose to hunt

it down,--placing guards as it were at the very outposts of

possibility,--gravely giving out laws to insanity and prescribing

moral fences to distempered intellects, could never have entered

into a head less entertainingly constructed than that of Fuller, or

Sir Thomas Browne, the very air of whose style the conclusion of

this passage most aptly imitates.

_Bishop Brownrig._--"He carried learning enough _in numerato_ about him

in his pockets for any discourse, and had much more at home in his

chests for any serious dispute."

_Modest Want._--"Those that with diligence fight against poverty, though

neither conquer till death makes it a drawn battle; expect not but

prevent their craving of thee: for God forbid the heavens should never

rain, till the earth first opens her mouth; seeing _some grounds will

sooner burn than chap_."

_Death-bed Temptations._--"The devil is most busy on the last day of his

term; and a tenant to be outed cares not what mischief he doth."

_Conversation._--"Seeing we are civilized Englishmen, let us not be

naked savages in our talk."

_Wounded Soldier._--"Halting is the stateliest march of a soldier; and

'tis a brave sight to see the flesh of an ancient as torn as his

colours."

_Wat Tyler._--"A _misogrammatist_; if a good Greek word may be given to

so barbarous a rebel."

_Heralds._--"Heralds new mould men's names,--taking from them, adding

to them, melting out all the liquid letters, torturing mutes to make

them speak, and making vowels dumb,--to bring it to a fallacious

_homonomy_ at the last, that their names may be the same with those

noble houses they pretend to."

_Antiquarian Diligence._--"It is most worthy observation, with what

diligence he [Camden] enquired after ancient places, making hue and cry

after many a city which was run away, and by certain marks and tokens

pursuing to find it; as by the situation on the Roman highways, by just

distance from other ancient cities, by some affinity of name, by

tradition of the inhabitants, by Roman coins digged up, and by some

appearance of ruins. A broken urn is a whole evidence; or an old gate

still surviving, out of which the city is run out. Besides, commonly

some new spruce town not far off is grown out of the ashes thereof,

which yet hath so much natural affection as dutifully to own those

reverend ruins for her mother."

_Henry de Essex._--"He is too well known in our English Chronicles,

being Baron of Raleigh, in Essex, and Hereditary Standard Bearer of

England. It happened in the reign of this king [Henry II.] there was a

fierce battle fought in Flintshire, at Coleshall, between the English

and Welsh, wherein this Henry de Essex _animum et signum simul abjecit_,

betwixt traitor and coward, cast away both his courage and banner

together, occasioning a great overthrow of English. But he that had the

baseness to do, had the boldness to deny the doing of so foul a fact;

until he was challenged in combat by Robert de Momford, a knight,

eye-witness thereof, and by him overcome in a duel. Whereupon his large

inheritance was confiscated to the king, and he himself, _partly thrust,

partly going into a convent, hid his head in a cowl, under which,

betwixt shame and sanctity, he blushed out the remainder of his

life_."[20]--_Worthies. Article, Bedfordshire._

[20] The fine imagination of Fuller has done what might have been

pronounced impossible: it has given an interest, and a holy

character, to coward infamy. Nothing can be more beautiful than the

concluding account of the last days, and expiatory retirement, of

poor Henry de Essex. The address with which the whole of this little

story is told is most consummate: the charm of it seems to consist

in a perpetual balance of antitheses not too violently opposed, and

the consequent activity of mind in which the reader is

kept:--"Betwixt traitor and coward"--"baseness to do, boldness to

deny"--"partly thrust, partly going, into a convent"--"betwixt shame

and sanctity." The reader by this artifice is taken into a kind of

partnership with the writer,--his judgment is exercised in settling

the preponderance,--he feels as if he were consulted as to the

issue. But the modern historian flings at once the dead weight of

his own judgment into the scale, and settles the matter.

_Sir Edward Harwood, Knt._--"I have read of a bird, which hath a face

like, and yet will prey upon, a man; who coming to the water to drink,

and finding there by reflection, that he had killed one like himself,

pineth away by degrees, and never afterwards enjoyeth itself.[21] Such

is in some sort the condition of Sir Edward. This accident, that he had

killed one in a private quarrel, put a period to his carnal mirth, and

was a covering to his eyes all the days of his life. No possible

provocations could afterwards tempt him to a duel; and no wonder that

one's conscience loathed that whereof he had surfeited. He refused all

challenges with more honour than others accepted them; it being well

known, that he would set his foot as far in the face of his enemy as any

man alive."--_Worthies. Art. Lincolnshire._

[21] I do not know where Fuller read of this bird; but a more awful

and affecting story, and moralizing of a story, in Natural History,

or rather in that Fabulous Natural History, where poets and

mythologists found the Phœnix and the Unicorn, and "other strange

fowl," is no where extant. It is a fable which Sir Thomas Browne, if

he had heard of it, would have exploded among his Vulgar Errors; but

the delight which he would have taken in the discussing of its

probabilities, would have shewn that the _truth of the fact_, though

the avowed object of his search, was not so much the motive which

put him upon the investigation, as those hidden affinities and

poetical analogies,--those _essential verities_ in the application

of strange fable, which made him linger with such reluctant delay

among the last fading lights of popular tradition; and not seldom to

conjure up a superstition, that had been long extinct, from its

dusty grave, to inter it himself with greater ceremonies and

solemnities of burial.

_Decayed Gentry._--"It happened in the reign of King James, when Henry

Earl of Huntingdon was Lieutenant of Leicestershire, that a labourer's

son in that county was pressed into the wars; as I take it, to go over

with Count Mansfield. The old man at Leicester requested his son might

be discharged, as being the only staff of his age, who by his industry

maintained him and his mother. The Earl demanded his name, which the man

for a long time was loth to tell (as suspecting it a fault for so poor a

man to confess the truth), at last he told his name was Hastings.

'Cousin Hastings,' said the Earl, 'we cannot all be top branches of the

tree, though we all spring from the same root; your son, my kinsman,

shall not be pressed.' So good was the meeting of modesty in a poor,

with courtesy in an honourable person, and gentry I believe in both. And

I have reason to believe, that some who justly own the surnames and

blood of Bohuns, Mortimers, and Plantagenets (though ignorant of their

own extractions), are hid in the heap of common people, where they find

that under a thatched cottage, which some of their ancestors

could not enjoy in a leaded castle,--contentment, with quiet and

security."--_Worthies. Art. Of Shire-Reeves or Shiriffes._

_Tenderness of Conscience in a Tradesman._--"Thomas Curson, born in

Allhallows, Lombard-street, armourer, dwelt without Bishopsgate. It

happened that a stage-player borrowed a rusty musket, which had lain

long leger in his shop: now though his part were comical, he therewith

acted an unexpected tragedy, killing one of the standers by, the gun

casually going off on the stage, which he suspected not to be charged. O

the difference of divers men in the tenderness of their consciences;

some are scarce touched with a wound, whilst others are wounded with a

touch therein. This poor armourer was highly afflicted therewith, though

done against his will, yea without his knowledge, in his absence, by

another, out of mere chance. Hereupon he resolved to give all his estate

to pious uses: no sooner had he gotten a round sum, but presently he

posted with it in his apron to the Court of Aldermen, and was in pain

till by their direction he had settled it for the relief of poor in his

own and other parishes, and disposed of some hundreds of pounds

accordingly, as I am credibly informed by the then churchwardens of the

said parish. Thus as he conceived himself casually (though at a great

distance) to have occasioned the death of one, he was the immediate and

direct cause of giving a comfortable living to many."

_Burning of Wickliffe's Body by Order of the Council of

Constance._--"Hitherto [A.D. 1428] the corpse of John Wickliffe had

quietly slept in his grave about forty-one years after his death, till

his body was reduced to bones, and his bones almost to dust. For though

the earth in the chancel of Lutterworth, in Leicestershire, where he was

interred, hath not so quick a digestion with the earth of Aceldama, to

consume flesh in twenty-four hours, yet such the appetite thereof, and

all other English graves, to leave small reversions of a body after so

many years. But now such the spleen of the Council of Constance, as

they not only cursed his memory as dying an obstinate heretic, but

ordered that his bones (with this charitable caution,--if it may be

discerned from the bodies of other faithful people) to be taken out of

the ground, and thrown far off from any Christian burial. In obedience

hereunto, Rich. Fleming, Bishop of Lincoln, Diocesan of Lutterworth,

sent his officers (vultures with a quick sight, scent, at a dead

carcase) to ungrave him. Accordingly to Lutterworth they come, Sumner,

Commissary, Official, Chancellor, Proctors, Doctors, and their servants

(so that the remnant of the body would not hold out a bone amongst so

many hands), take what was left out of the grave, and burnt them to

ashes, and cast them into Swift, a neighbouring brook, running hard by.

_Thus this brook has conveyed his ashes into Avon, Avon into Severn,

Severn into the narrow seas, they into the main ocean; and thus the

ashes of Wickliffe are the emblem of his doctrine, which now is

dispersed all the world over._"[22]--Church History.

[22] The concluding period of this most lively narrative I will not

call a conceit: it is one of the grandest conceptions I ever met

with. One feels the ashes of Wickliffe gliding away out of the reach

of the Sumners, Commissaries, Officials, Proctors, Doctors, and all

the puddering rout of executioners of the impotent rage of the

baffled Council: from Swift into Avon, from Avon into Severn, from

Severn into the narrow seas, from the narrow seas into the main

ocean, where they become the emblem of his doctrine, "dispersed all

the world over." Hamlet's tracing the body of Cæsar to the clay that

stops a beer-barrel, is a no less curious pursuit of "ruined

mortality;" but it is in an inverse ratio to this: it degrades and

saddens us, for one part of our nature at least; but this expands

the whole of our nature, and gives to the body a sort of

ubiquity,--a diffusion, as far as the actions of its partner can

have reach or influence.

I have seen this passage smiled at, and set down as a quaint conceit

of old Fuller. But what is not a conceit to those who read it in a

temper different from that in which the writer composed it? The most

pathetic parts of poetry to cold tempers seem and are nonsense, as

divinity was to the Greeks foolishness. When Richard II., meditating

on his own utter annihilation as to royalty, cries out,

"O that I were a mockery king of snow,

To melt before the sun of Bolingbroke,"

if we have been going on pace for pace with the passion before, this

sudden conversion of a strong-felt metaphor into something to be

actually realized in nature, like that of Jeremiah, "Oh! that my

head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears," is strictly

and strikingly natural; but come unprepared upon it, and it is a

conceit; and so is a "head" turned into "waters."

EDAX ON APPETITE

(1811. TEXT OF 1818)

_To the Editor of the Reflector_

Mr. Reflector,--I am going to lay before you a case of the most

iniquitous persecution that ever poor devil suffered.

You must know, then, that I have been visited with a calamity ever since

my birth. How shall I mention it without offending delicacy? Yet out it

must. My sufferings then have all arisen from a most inordinate

appetite----

Not for wealth, not for vast possessions,--then might I have hoped to

find a cure in some of those precepts of philosophers or poets,--those

verba et voces which Horace speaks of:

"quibus hunc lenire dolorem

Possis, et magnam morbi deponere partem;"

not for glory, not for fame, not for applause,--for against this

disease, too, he tells us there are certain piacula, or, as Pope has

chosen to render it,

"rhymes, which fresh and fresh applied,

Will cure the arrant'st puppy of his pride;"

nor yet for pleasure, properly so called: the strict and virtuous

lessons which I received in early life from the best of parents,--a

pious clergyman of the Church of England, now no more,--I trust have

rendered me sufficiently secure on that side:----

No, Sir, for none of these things; but an appetite, in its coarsest and

least metaphorical sense,--an appetite for _food_.

The exorbitances of my arrow-root and pap-dish days I cannot go back far

enough to remember, only I have been told, that my mother's constitution

not admitting of my being nursed at home, the woman who had the care of

me for that purpose used to make most extravagant demands for my

pretended excesses in that kind; which my parents, rather than believe

any thing unpleasant of me, chose to impute to the known covetousness

and mercenary disposition of that sort of people. This blindness

continued on their part after I was sent for home, up to the period

when it was thought proper, on account of my advanced age, that I should

mix with other boys more unreservedly than I had hitherto done. I was

accordingly sent to boarding-school.

Here the melancholy truth became too apparent to be disguised. The

prying republic of which a great school consists, soon found me out:

there was no shifting the blame any longer upon other people's

shoulders,--no good-natured maid to take upon herself the enormities of

which I stood accused in the article of bread and butter, besides the

crying sin of stolen ends of puddings, and cold pies strangely missing.

The truth was but too manifest in my looks,--in the evident signs of

inanition which I exhibited after the fullest meals, in spite of the

double allowance which my master was privately instructed by my kind

parents to give me. The sense of the ridiculous, which is but too much

alive in grown persons, is tenfold more active and alert in boys. Once

detected, I was the constant butt of their arrows,--the mark against

which every puny leveller directed his little shaft of scorn. The very

Graduses and Thesauruses were raked for phrases to pelt me with by the

tiny pedants. Ventri natus,--Ventri deditus,--Vesana gula,--Escarum

gurges,--Dapibus indulgens,--Non dans frœna gulæ,--Sectans lautæ fercula

mensæ, resounded wheresoever I past. I lead a weary life, suffering the

penalties of guilt for that which was no crime, but only following the

blameless dictates of nature. The remembrance of those childish

reproaches haunts me yet oftentimes in my dreams. My school-days come

again, and the horror I used to feel, when in some silent corner retired

from the notice of my unfeeling playfellows, I have sat to mumble the

solitary slice of gingerbread allotted me by the bounty of considerate

friends, and have ached at heart because I could not spare a portion of

it, as I saw other boys do, to some favourite boy;--for if I know my own

heart, I was never selfish,--never possessed a luxury which I did not

hasten to communicate to others; but my food, alas! was none; it was an

indispensable necessary; I could as soon have spared the blood in my

veins, as have parted that with my companions.

Well, no one stage of suffering lasts for ever: we should grow

reconciled to it at length, I suppose, if it did. The miseries of my

school-days had their end; I was once more restored to the paternal

dwelling. The affectionate solicitude of my parents was directed to the

good-natured purpose of concealing even from myself the infirmity which

haunted me. I was continually told that I was growing, and the appetite

I displayed was humanely represented as being nothing more than a

symptom and an effect of that. I used even to be complimented upon it.

But this temporary fiction could not endure above a year or two. I

ceased to grow, but alas! I did not cease my demands for alimentary

sustenance.

Those times are long since past, and with them have ceased to exist the

fond concealment,--the indulgent blindness,--the delicate

over-looking,--the compassionate fiction. I and my infirmity are left

exposed and bare to the broad, unwinking eye of the world, which nothing

can elude. My meals are scanned, my mouthfuls weighed in a balance: that

which appetite demands, is set down to the account of gluttony,--a sin

which my whole soul abhors, nay, which Nature herself has put it out of

my power to commit. I am constitutionally disenabled from that vice; for

how can he be guilty of excess, who never can get enough? Let them

cease, then, to watch my plate; and leave off their ungracious

comparisons of it to the seven baskets of fragments, and the

supernaturally-replenished cup of old Baucis; and be thankful that their

more phlegmatic stomachs, not their virtue, have saved them from the

like reproaches. I do not see that any of them desist from eating till

the holy rage of hunger, as some one calls it, is supplied. Alas! I am

doomed to stop short of that continence.

What am I to do? I am by disposition inclined to conviviality, and the

social meal. I am no gourmand: I require no dainties: I should despise

the board of Heliogabalus, except for its long sitting. Those vivacious,

long-continued meals of the latter Romans, indeed I justly envy; but the

kind of fare which the Curii and Dentati put up with, I could be content

with. Dentatus I have been called, among other unsavory jests.

Double-meal is another name which my acquaintance have palmed upon me,

for an innocent piece of policy which I put in practice for some time

without being found out; which was,--going the round of my friends,

beginning with the most primitive feeders among them, who take their

dinner about one o'clock, and so successively dropping in upon the next

and the next, till by the time I got among my more fashionable

intimates, whose hour was six or seven, I have nearly made up the body

of a just and complete meal (as I reckon it), without taking more than

one dinner (as they account of dinners) at one person's house. Since I

have been found out, I endeavour to make up by a damper, as I call it,

at home, before I go out. But alas! with me, increase of appetite truly

grows by what it feeds on. What is peculiarly offensive to me at those

dinner-parties is, the senseless custom of cheese, and the dessert

afterwards. I have a rational antipathy to the former; and for fruit,

and those other vain vegetable substitutes for meat (meat, the only

legitimate aliment for human creatures since the flood, as I take it to

be deduced from that permission, or ordinance rather, given to Noah and

his descendants), I hold them in perfect contempt. Hay for horses. I

remember a pretty apologue, which Mandeville tells very much to this

purpose in his Fable of the Bees:--He brings in a Lion arguing with a

Merchant, who had ventured to expostulate with this king of beasts upon

his violent methods of feeding. The Lion thus retorts:--"Savage I am,

but no Creature can be called Cruel but what either by Malice or

Insensibility extinguishes his natural Pity: The Lion was born without

Compassion; we follow the instinct of our Nature; the Gods have

appointed us to live upon the waste and spoil of other Animals, and as

long as we can meet with dead ones, we never hunt after the Living. 'Tis

only Man, mischievous Man, that can make Death a sport. Nature taught

your stomach to crave nothing but Vegetables."--(Under favour of the

Lion, if he meant to assert this universally of mankind, it is not true.

However, what he says presently is very sensible.)--"Your violent

fondness to change, and greater eagerness after Novelties, have prompted

you to the destruction of Animals without Justice or Necessity.... The

Lion has a ferment within him, that consumes the toughest Skin and

hardest Bones, as well as the Flesh of all Animals without exception:

Your squeamish Stomach, in which the Digestive Heat is weak and

inconsiderable, won't so much as admit of the most tender Parts of them,

unless above half the Concoction has been performed by artificial Fire

beforehand; and yet what Animal have you spared, to satisfy the Caprices

of a languid Appetite? Languid I say; for what is Man's Hunger if

compared to the Lion's? Yours, when it is at the worst, makes you

Faint; mine makes me Mad: Oft have I tried with Roots and Herbs to allay

the violence of it, but in vain; nothing but large quantities of Flesh

can any ways appease it."--Allowing for the Lion not having a prophetic

instinct to take in every lusus naturæ that was possible of the human

appetite, he was, generally speaking, in the right; and the Merchant was

so impressed with his argument that, we are told, he replied not, but

fainted away. O, Mr. Reflector, that I were not obliged to add, that the

creature who thus argues was but a type of me! Miserable man! _I am that

Lion._ "Oft have I tried with roots and herbs to allay that violence,

but in vain; nothing but----."

Those tales which are renewed as often as the editors of papers want to

fill up a space in their unfeeling columns, of great eaters,--people

that devour whole geese and legs of mutton _for wagers_, are sometimes

attempted to be drawn to a parallel with my case. This wilful

confounding of motives and circumstances, which make all the difference

of moral or immoral in actions, just suits the sort of talent which some

of my acquaintance pride themselves upon. _Wagers!_--I thank heaven, I

was never mercenary, nor could consent to prostitute a gift (though but

a left-handed one) of nature, to the enlarging of my worldly substance;

prudent as the necessities, which that fatal gift have involved me in,

might have made such a prostitution to appear in the eyes of an

indelicate world.

Rather let me say, that to the satisfaction of that talent which was

given me, I have been content to sacrifice no common expectations; for

such I had from an old lady, a near relation of our family, in whose

good graces I had the fortune to stand, till one fatal evening----. You

have seen, Mr. Reflector, if you have ever passed your time much in

country towns, the kind of suppers which elderly ladies in those places

have lying in petto in an adjoining parlour, next to that where they are

entertaining their periodically-invited coevals with cards and muffins.

The cloth is usually spread some half-hour before the final rubber is

decided, whence they adjourn to sup upon what may emphatically be called

_nothing_. A sliver of ham, purposely contrived to be transparent to

shew the china-dish through it, neighbouring a slip of invisible brawn,

which abuts upon something they call a tartlet, as that is bravely

supported by an atom of marmalade, flanked in its turn by a grain of

potted beef, with a power of such dishlings, _minims of hospitality_,

spread in defiance of human nature, or rather with an utter ignorance of

what it demands. Being engaged at one of these card-parties, I was

obliged to go a little before _supper-time_ (as they facetiously call

the point of time in which they are taking these shadowy refections),

and the old lady, with a sort of fear shining through the smile of

courteous hospitality that beamed in her countenance, begged me to step

into the next room and take something before I went out in the cold,--a

proposal which lay not in my nature to deny. Indignant at the airy

prospect I saw before me, I set to, and in a trice dispatched the whole

meal intended for eleven persons,--fish, flesh, fowl, pastry,--to the

sprigs of garnishing parsley, and the last fearful custard that quaked

upon the board. I need not describe the consternation, when in due time

the dowagers adjourned from their cards. Where was the supper?--and the

servants' answer, Mr. ---- had eat it all.--That freak, however, jested

me out of a good three hundred pounds a year, which I afterwards was

informed for a certainty the old lady meant to leave me. I mention it

not in illustration of the unhappy faculty which I am possessed of; for

any unlucky wag of a school-boy, with a tolerable appetite, could have

done as much without feeling any hurt after it,--only that you may judge

whether I am a man likely to set my talent to sale, or to require the

pitiful stimulus of a wager.

I have read in Pliny, or in some author of that stamp, of a reptile in

Africa, whose venom is of that hot, destructive quality, that

wheresoever it fastens its tooth, the whole substance of the animal that

has been bitten in a few seconds is reduced to dust, crumbles away, and

absolutely disappears: it is called from this quality, the Annihilator.

Why am I forced to seek, in all the most prodigious and portentous facts

of Natural History, for creatures typical of myself? _I am that Snake,

that Annihilator_: "wherever I fasten, in a few seconds----."

O happy sick men, that are groaning under the want of that very thing,

the excess of which is my torment! O fortunate, too fortunate, if you

knew your happiness, invalids! What would I not give to exchange this

fierce concoctive and digestive heat,--this rabid fury which vexes me,

which tears and torments me,--for your quiet, mortified, hermit-like,

subdued, and sanctified stomachs,--your cool, chastened inclinations,

and coy desires for food!

To what unhappy figuration of the parts intestine I owe this unnatural

craving, I must leave to the anatomists and the physicians to determine:

they, like the rest of the world, have doubtless their eye upon me; and

as I have been cut up alive by the sarcasms of my friends, so I shudder

when I contemplate the probability that this animal frame, when its

restless appetites shall have ceased their importunity, may be cut up

also (horrible suggestion!) to determine in what system of solids or

fluids this original sin of my constitution lay lurking. What work will

they make with their acids and alkalines, their serums and coagulums,

effervescences, viscous matter, bile, chyle, and acrimonious juices, to

explain that cause which Nature, who willed the effect to punish me for

my sins, may no less have determined to keep in the dark from them, to

punish them for their presumption.