"long-continued cheers followed the close of each succeeding act; half-stifled screams and involuntary ejaculations burst forth when the fatal blow was struck to the daughter's heart; and the curtain fell amidst the most deafening applause of a highly-excited auditory." The play was an unquestionable triumph, which Knowles had sat in the pit to witness and enjoy. It was acted fourteen nights to crowded houses, a great run for those days. That Virginius, or any other of Knowles's plays, was all that his friends claimed for it, no person would now undertake to maintain; he attempted to imitate the style of the Elizabethan dramatists, and chose an inferior model, Massinger; but while he succeeded in reproducing the cramped inversions and other faults of the original, he wholly failed in assimilating the simplicity and the beauties! Let any reader compare Webster's Appius and Virginia with the modern play; and although some scenes of the latter will bear favourable comparison with its predecessor, its inferiority on the whole is beyond question. Knowles was not a poet; the greater part of his blank verse is only bald, inverted prose, although we occasionally come upon such lines as these: Will she come or not? I'll call myself:-She will not dare! O when Is it a voice or nothing answers me? I hear a sound so fine-there's nothing lives He was a clever man, in whom deep passionate tenderness, and dramatic instincts went far to supply the place of ideality, and occasionally raised his imagination almost to the heights of true inspiration. The enthusiasm he created is easily accounted for. Since the days of Otway, succeeding dramatic authors had inflicted upon their audiences one long succession of cold declamation and turgid rant; at length, after the lapse of considerably more than a century, here was a play with flesh and blood in it, in which action and situation were paramount, which appealed to the universal instincts of all men, and in which men did as well as talked. In these essentials it resembled the grand school of drama that it imitated, and in the first flush of gratification it was not to be expected that men would examine too curiously as to how close or how distant the resemblance might be. Knowles received £400 from Harris, of Covent Garden; and better still, was hailed by press and theatre goer, as the greatest dramatist of the day—which, by-the-by, was not a very lofty distinction. 999 Macready seems to have been greatly surprised at Knowles's appearance. "His rough exterior," he says, "would better convey the idea of the captain of a Berwick smack, than that of the poet who could conceive the virgin purity, the tenderness and grace of his 'Sweet Virginia.' He went to a supper which the dramatist gave in a Covent Garden coffee-house. Hazlitt was present; and he describes how the critic became so irritated at Knowles's boisterous sallies and merriment, that he had to continually rebuke him, and tell him not to play the fool. In the season of 1823 Caius Gracchus, having been remodelled, was produced at Drury Lane, with partial success; 1825 witnessed the production of William Tell, with Macready as the hero; it almost rivalled Virginius in popularity. But a comedy, brought out five years later, The Blind Beggar's Daughter, was a total failure. During this time he had embarked in a newspaper speculation, which failed, and by which he lost some money. These pursuits, interfering with teaching his classes fell off; in 1830 he removed from Glasgow to Newhaven, where he recommenced teaching, lecturing, and writing new plays as indefatigably as ever. He usually composed while taking his afternoon walk upon the sands; then he would return home to a four-o'clock dinner, play marbles with his boys, or make kites for them, then off to Edinburgh for evening classes. Alfred the Great, played at Drury Lane in 1831, with Macready again in the title rôle, owed much of its popularity to the liberal speeches with which it was larded, and which the audience chose to apply to the new Sovereign, who had just mounted the throne. Knowles made £300 by it. But a far more important work appeared in the next year, The Hunchback. This play had been written for Drury Lane, and Kean was to have played Master Walter; but it was fated that the great actor should never appear in one of his old friend's ereations. The production was so long delayed that Knowles lost his temper, and insisting upon his MS. being returned, took it at once to Covent Garden, to Charles Kemble. The affairs of that theatre were so deranged at the time, that its acceptance was doubtful. "If you think it would increase the chance of success, I will play Master Walter myself," said the author. That suggestion turned the scale in its favour. The play was put into rehearsal at once, and brought out on the 5th April, 1832. Fanny Kemble was the Julia, Charles Kemble the Sir Thomas Clifford. Again our author scored an immense success, and deluged the house with tears. The author-actor was led before the curtain by Kemble at the close of the play-and then was acted a little scene highly characteristic of the man. Miss Kemble's play of Francis the First was then ready for production; the success of The Hunchback, however, determined her father to put it aside for a time. Our Don Quixote, impetuous and unselfish as usual, argued against such an arrangement, and, coming down to the footlights, addressed the audience, saying: "Ladies and gentlemen,-Allow my feelings of gratitude on this occasion to triumph, and do not listen to my friend, Mr. Kemble. His daughter's] tragedy ought to be acted on Monday. It is but common justice to Mr. Kemble to say so.' Kemble, however, for his own interest, was not to be led away by such pleadings, and Francis the First was not acted on Monday. Equally characteristic is his own account of the manner in which he bore his success. 66 As soon as they let me away from the front, Iran, trembling and panting, to my dressingroom, and bolting the door, I sank down upon my knees, and from the bottom of my soul thanked God for his wondrous kindness to me. I was thinking on the bairns at home, and if ever I uttered the prayer of a grateful heart, it was in that little chamber." Two of the female bairns were in front. It was their first visit to a theatre. They had been told, probably as a preparative for either fortune, that new plays were sometimes hissed as well as applauded; and at the end of the third act, having heard as yet only applause, one of them innocently inquired when the hissing would begin! The Press was most eulogistic over the play, but not over the acting of the author. Knowles had neither stage-face nor presence; his voice was inflexible, and his utterance somewhat pedantic. Charles Kemble remarked sarcastically that the only person who did not understand the author was the gentleman who played Master Walter. Knowles's histrionic powers were very limited. Yet he afterwards confessed that to his brief success as an actor he owed what he would in vain have looked for as an author -the means of giving his children a good education and a comfortable home. For he now started upon a starring tour in the provinces, visited several of the great provincial towns, and everywhere met with the most pronounced success. VOL. I. Glasgow was one of the first places he visited. His coming thither was a great event; a troop of old boys was awaiting his arrival, and as he put his large geniai face out of the coach window a storm of shouts made the street ring again; the door was torn open, and a dozen hands were the next moment dragging him out of the coach; then there was a clamour of inquiries, and with his blue cloak thrown round him like a Roman toga, the sturdy, thick-set figure, surrounded by his noisy disciples, marched along the streets to his lodgings. He had particularly stipulated that he should be provided with a table that would accommodate fifteen to twenty persons, and upon arriving at his domicile he thus addressed his conductors : "Now mark me, boys, ye see this table; my dinner hour is three o'clock; and every day, Sunday excepted, I shall expect to see as many of my former pupils as my board will seat." Glasgow was rigidly puritanical in those days, and regarded players as unclean beasts; but it relaxed in favour of this one. Every one went to the theatre to see him, even members of the Kirk; and one night an elderly Quaker was seen enthusiastically waving his broad-brimmed hat at the situation in which Master Walter reveals himself as Julia's father. I have not space to give further accounts of Knowles's dramatic successes and failures. Chief among the former were The Wife, at Covent Garden, in 1833; The Love Chase, with the delicious Nisbett as Constance, in 1837; and Love, for which Madame Vestris gave him £600, the largest sum he ever received. A lawsuit which his father-that terrible father was a sort of Old Man of the Sea to his unfortunate son-entered into with the printer of his "Pronouncing Dictionary," swept away £3000 of poor Sheridan's earnings. In 1834 he made a trip to America, where he met with a great reception. In 1841 his first wife died, and in the next he married an actress (Miss Elphinstone). His last play, The Secretary, was produced in the same year. The profits he derived from his first six plays —which spread over a period of twelve years—did not exceed, so says his son, £1,100; and the remaining eleven, produced in as many years, brought him in about £3,500. Such was the remuneration of dramatists in those days. Nous avons changé tout cela! The dramatic vein being exhausted, he turned to novel writing, and wrote two works of fiction, one of which appeared in The Sunday Times. His circumstances were anything but flourishing. By the amateur performances of the Gui d of Literature and Art a respectable sum was realised for him, and after much delay, and much intercession and high influence, a generous Go vernment awarded him a pension of £200 a-year. We now come to the final metamorphosis of our extraordinary hero, who next appears in the character of a Baptist preacher, fierce Anti-Papist, and writer of books of religious controversy. How this "conversion" came about we have no means of explaining. Knowles was a man who was always at white-heat about something, and never too long about anything. But, as we have seen, he had a taste for preaching in his youth, and his mind was always tinctured with religious feeling. It has been stated that he became a bitter enemy to dramatic entertainments, and denounced them from the pulpit as fiercely as he did the Pope; that he even desired to buy up his plays and subject them to the same fate that he desired for all who differed from him in religion—the flames. It is but fair, however, to state that one of his friends, the minister of Cross Street Chapel, Islington, in a sermon preached upon Knowles's death, modified the generally received statement by asserting that even in his last years he had sent friends copies of his dramatic works, and that he still kept up a friendship with several of the old comrades of his unregenerate days. Still it is an unsatisfactory ending to the story of such a genial life. He died at Glasgow, on the 5th of December, 1862; and was buried in the Necropolis of that city. H. BOLTON BAKER. |