TIL. 'Has life so little store of real woes, That here ye wend to taste fictitious grief? In folly's volume, 't is the actor's leaf, Who dries his own by drawing others' tears, And raising present mirth, makes glad his future years. IV. 'Albeit how like young Betty doth he flee! V. "This goodly pile, upheav'd by Wyatt's toil, The fire alarm, and midnight drum may beat, Start ye? Perchance Death's angel may be sent, Ere from the flaming temple ye retreat, And ye who met on revel idlesse bent, May find in pleasure's fane your grave and monument. VI. 'Your debts mount high — ye plunge in deeper waste, Who can arrest your prodigal career? Who can keep down the levity of youth? What sound can startle age's stubborn ear? Who can redeem from wretchedness and ruth Men true to falsehood's voice, false to the voice of truth?' VIII. 'For what is Hamlet, but a hare in March? And what is Brutus, but a croaking owl? Shakspeare, how true thine adage, 'fair is foul;' And nought is every thing, and every thing is nought. IX. 'Sons of Parnassus! whom I view above, What reams of foolscap, while your brains ye rack, And reproduce in rags the rags ye blot in song. X. 'So fares the follower in the Muses' train, And elephants and colts down trample Shakspeare's art.' COBBETT transmits his address to the secretary, under cover of a characteristic letter, in which he does not hesitate to give the manager a 'lick with the rough side of his tongue.' The reader will note his interrogatory manner, and how he replies, rejoins, confutes, and still confutes, as in the political articles which made his 'Register' so famous among the English yeomanry. The letter runs thus: 'SIR: To the gewgaw fetters of rhyme, (invented by the monks to enslave the people,) I have a rooted objection. I have therefore written an address for your theatre in plain, homespun, yeoman's prose; in the doing whereof, I hope I am swayed by nothing but an independent wish to open the eyes of this gulled people, to prevent a repetition of the dramatic bamboozling they have hitherto labored under. If you like what I have done, and mean to make use of it, I don't want any such aristocratic reward as a piece of plate with two griffins sprawling upon it, or a dog and a jackass fighting for a ha'p'orth of gilt gingerbread, or any such Bartholomew Fair nonsense. All I ask is, that the door-keepers of your play-house may take all the sets of my Register, now on hand, and force every body who enters your doors to buy one, giving afterward a debtor and creditor account of what they have received, post-paid, and in due course remitting me the money and unsold Registers, carriage-paid. 'I am, etc., W. c.' The address is to be spoken in the character of a Hampshire Fariner, and bears the following motto, from Ovid : 'Rabida qui concitus irâ Implevit pariter ternis latratibus auras Et sparsit virides spumis albentibus agros.' 'MOST THINKING PEOPLE: When persons address an audience from the stage, it is usual, either in words or gesture, to say, 'Ladies and Gentlemen, your servant.' If I were base enough, mean enough, paltry enough, and brute beast enough, to follow that fashion, I should tell two lies in a breath. In the first place, you are not Ladies and Gentlemen, but I hope something better, that is to say, honest men and women; and in the next place, if you were ever so much ladies, and ever so much gentlemen, I am not, nor ever will be, your humble servant. You see me here, most thinking people, by mere chance. I have not been within the doors of a play-house before for these ten years, nor till that abominable custom of taking money at the doors is discontinued, will I ever sanction a theatre with my presence. The stage door is the only gate of freedom in the whole edifice, and through that I made my way from Bagshaw's in Brydges-street, to accost you. Look about you. Are you not all comfortable? Nay, never slink, mun; speak out, if you are dissatisfied, and tell me so before I leave town. You are now, (thanks to Mr. Whitbread,) got into a large, comfortable house. Not into a gimcrack palace; not into a Solomon's Temple; not into a frost-work of Brobdignag filagree; but into a plain, honest, homely, industrious, wholesome, brown, brick play-house. You have been struggling for independence and elbow-room these three years; and who gave it you? Who helped you out of Lilliput? Who routed you from a rat-hole, five inches by four, to perch you in a palace? Again and again I answer, Mr. Whitbread. You might have sweltered in that place with the Greek name till Doomsday, and neither Lord Castlereagh, Mr. Canning, no, nor the Marquis Wellesley, would have turned a trowel to help you out! Remember that. Never forget that. Read it to your children, and to your children's children! And now, most thinking people, cast your eyes over my head to what the builder, (I beg his pardon, the architect,) calls the proscenium. No motto, no slang, no popish Latin, to keep the people in the dark. No Veluti in Speculum. Nothing in the dead languages, properly so called, for they ought to die, ay, and be damned to boot! The Covent Garden Manager tried that, and a pretty business he made of it! When a man says Veluti in Speculum, he is called a man of letters. Very well; and is not a man who cries O. P. a man of letters too? You ran your O. P. against his Veluti in Speculum, and pray which beat? I prophesied that, though I never told any body. I take it for granted, that every intelligent man, woman, and child, to whom I address myself, has stood severally and respectively in Little Russel-street, and cast their, his, her, and its eyes on the outside of this building, before they paid their money to view the inside. Look at the brick work, English Audience! Look at the brick work! All plain and smooth like a quakers' meeting. None of your Egyptian pyramids, to entomb subscribers' capitals. No overgrown colonnades of stone, like an alderman's gouty legs, in white cotton stockings, fit only to use as rammers for paving Tottenham Court Road. This house is neither after the model of a temple in Athens, no, nor a temple in Moorfields, but it is built to act English plays in, and provided you have good scenery, dresses, and decorations, I dare say you would n't break your hearts if the outside were as plain as the pike-staff I used to carry when I was a sergeant. Apropos, as the French valets say, who cut their masters' throats; apropos, a word about dresses. You must, many of you, have seen what I have read a description of, Kemble and Mrs. Siddons in Macbeth, with more gold and silver plaistered on their doublets, than would have kept an honest family in butchers' meat and flannel from year's end to year's end! I am informed, now mind, I do not vouch for the fact, but I am informed, that all such extravagant idleness is to be done away with here. Lady Macbeth is to have a plain quilted petticoat, a cotton gown, and a mob cap, (as the court parasites call it; it will be well for them if, one of these days, they don't wear a mob cap-I mean a white cap, with a mob to look at them ;) and Macbeth is to appear in an honest yeoman's drab coat, and a pair of black calamanco breeches. Not Sal-amanca ; no, nor Talavera neither, my most Noble Marquis, but plain, honest, black calamanco, stuff breeches. This is right; this is as it should be. Most thinking people, I have heard you much abused. There is not a compound in the language but is strung fifty in a rope, like onions, by the Morning Post, and hurled in your teeth. You are called the mob, and when they have made you out to be the mob, you are called the scum of the people, and the dregs of the people. I should like to know how you can be both. Take a basin of broth - not cheap soup, Mr. Wilberforce, not soup for the poor at a penny a quart, as your mixture of horse's legs, brick dust, and old shoes was denominated, but plain, wholesome, patriotic beef or mutton broth; take this, examine it, and you will find-mind, I do n't vouch for the fact, but I am told you will find, the dregs at the bottom, and the scum at the top. I will endeavor to explain this to you: England is a large earthen-ware pipkin. John Bull is the beef thrown into it. Taxes are the hot water he boils in. Rotten boroughs are the fuel that blazes under this same pipkin. Parliament is the ladle that stirs the hodge-podge, and sometimes but hold, I don't wish to pay Mr. Newman a second visit. I leave you better off than you have been this many a day. You have a good house over your head; you have beat the French in Spain; the harvest has turned out well; the comet keeps its distance; and red slippers are hawked about in Constantinople for next to nothing; and for all this, again and again I tell you, you are indebted to Mr. Whitebread ! ! !' SIR WALTER SCOTT was surely never so closely imitated, in prose or verse, as in the Tale of Drury.' It was directed to be spoken by Mr. KEMBLE, in a suit of the Black Prince's armor, borrowed from the Tower. Is there a single reader of Marmion,' who can resist the admirable wit and spirit of this broad burlesque ? 'SURVEY this shield all bossy bright; These cuisses twain behold; Of steel inlaid with gold. He slew the vaunting Gaul: The Night. On fair Augusta's towers and trees And spire and dome, and turret height, To Redriff, Shadwell, Horselydown, Amid a silence so profound, It made the senses thrill, In bed-gown woke her dames; And lo! where Catherine-street extends, To every window pane: A bright ensanguin'd drain; Where patent shot they sell : The Tennis Court, so fair and tall, Partakes the ray, with Surgeon's Hall, The ticket porters' house of call, Old Bedlam, close by London Wall, Wright's shrimp and oyster shop withal, And Richardson's Hotel. Nor these alone, but far and wide To those who on the hills around Beheld the flames from Drury's mound, As from a lofty altar rise; It seem'd that nations did conspire, But first his worsted hosen plied, His nether bulk embraced; In tin or copper traced. The engines thunder'd thro' the street, And one, the leader of the band, With these came Rumford, Bumford, Cole, Crump from St. Giles's Pound: Whitford and Mitford join'd the train, Huggins and Muggins from Chick Lane, And Clutterbuck, who got a sprain Before the plug was found. Hobson and Jobson did not sleep, But ah! no trophy could they reap, For both were in the Donjon Keep Of Bridewell's gloomy mound! E'en Higginbottom now was posed, Nor notice give at all: For fear the roof should fall. An awful pause succeeds the stroke, And Eagle firemen knew And pour'd the hissing tide: Meanwhile the Muggins fought amain, And strove and struggled all in vain, For rallying but to fall again, He tottered, sunk, and died! Did none attempt, before he fell, Served but to share his grave! THAT ancient Cerberus of criticism, Dr. JOHNSON, figures in all his unwieldliness and prolixity; and his skill in logomachi descends, like a mantle, upon his successor. Mark the pompous truisms, and VOL. XI. 19 |