No piece was, perhaps, ever so completely cast in all its parts as this manager's comedy. Miss Farren had succeeded to Mrs. Abington in Lady Teazle; and Smith, the original Charles, had retired when I first saw it. The rest of the characters, with very slight exceptions, remained. I remember it was then

took the part of Charles after Smith; but, I thought, very unjustly. Smith, I fancy was more airy, and took the eye with a certain gaiety of person. He brought with him no sombre recollections of tragedy. He had not to expiate the fault of having pleased beforehand in lofty declamation. He had no

was meant to come, of them, must inspire a cold and killing aversion. Charles (the real canting person of the scene-for the hypocrisy of Joseph has its ulterior legitimate ends, but his brother's professions of a good heart centre in downright self-satisfaction) must be loved, and Joseph hated. To balance one disagreeable reality with another, Sir the fashion to cry down John Kemble, who Peter Teazle must be no longer the comic idea of a fretful old bachelor bridegroom, whose teasings (while King acted it) were evidently as much played off at you, as they were meant to concern anybody on the stage, —he must be a real person, capable in law of sustaining an injury-a person towards whom duties are to be acknowledged-the sins of Hamlet or of Richard to atone for. genuine crim. con. antagonist of the villanous His failure in these parts was a passport to seducer Joseph. To realise him more, his success in one of so opposite a tendency. sufferings under his unfortunate match must But, as far as I could judge, the weighty have the downright pungency of life-must sense of Kemble made up for more personal (or should) make you not mirthful but un- incapacity than he had to answer for. His comfortable, just as the same predicament harshest tones in this part came steeped and would move you in a neighbour or old friend. dulcified in good-humour. He made his The delicious scenes which give the play its defects a grace. His exact declamatory name and zest, must affect you in the same manner, as he managed it, only served to serious manner as if you heard the reputa- convey the points of his dialogue with more tion of a dear female friend attacked in your precision. It seemed to head the shafts to real presence. Crabtree and Sir Benjamin- carry them deeper. Not one of his sparkling those poor snakes that live but in the sun-sentences was lost. I remember minutely shine of your mirth-must be ripened by how he delivered each in succession, and this hot-bed process of realisation into asps cannot by any effort imagine how any of or amphisbænas; and Mrs. Candour-O! them could be altered for the better. No frightful!—become a hooded serpent. Oh! man could deliver brilliant dialogue-the who that remembers Parsons and Dodd- dialogue of Congreve or of Wycherley-bethe wasp and butterfly of the School for cause none understood it-half so well as Scandal in those two characters; and John Kemble. His Valentine, in Love for charming natural Miss Pope, the perfect Love, was, to my recollection, faultless. He gentlewoman as distinguished from the fine flagged sometimes in the intervals of tragic lady of comedy, in this latter part-would passion. He would slumber over the level forego the true scenic delight-the escape parts of an heroic character. His Macbeth from life-the oblivion of consequences-the has been known to nod. But he always holiday barring out of the pedant Reflection seemed to me to be particularly alive to -those Saturnalia of two or three brief pointed and witty dialogue. The relaxing hours, well won from the world-to sit in- levities of tragedy have not been touched by stead at one of our modern plays-to have any since him-the playful court-bred spirit his coward conscience (that forsooth must in which he condescended to the players not be left for a moment) stimulated with in Hamlet-the sportive relief which he perpetual appeals dulled rather,

and threw into the darker shades of Richard

blunted, as a faculty without repose must be —and his moral vanity pampered with images of notional justice, notional beneficence, lives saved without the spectator's risk, and fortunes given away that cost the author nothing?

- disappeared with him. He had his sluggish moods, his torpors-but they were the halting-stones and resting-place of his tragedy politic savings, and fetches of the breath-husbandry of the lungs, where nature pointed him to be an economist

rather, I think, than errors of the judg- vigilance, the "lidless dragon eyes,” of ment. They were, at worst, less painful present fashionable tragedy. than the eternal tormenting unappeasable

ON THE ACTING OF MUNDEN.

NoT many nights ago, I had come home from seeing this extraordinary performer in Cockletop; and when I retired to my pillow, his whimsical image still stuck by me, in a manner as to threaten sleep. In vain I tried to divest myself of it, by conjuring up the most opposite associations. I resolved to be serious. I raised up the gravest topics of life; private misery, public calamity. All would not do :

-There the antic sate
Mocking our state-

pin down, and call his. When you think he
has exhausted his battery of looks, in un-
accountable warfare with your gravity,
suddenly he sprouts out an entirely new set
of features, like Hydra. He is not one, but
legion; not so much a comedian, as a com-
pany. If his name could be multiplied like
his countenance, it might fill a play-bill.
He, and he alone, literally makes faces :
applied to any other person, the phrase is
a mere figure, denoting certain modifications
of the human countenance. Out of some
invisible wardrobe he dips for faces, as his
friend Suett used for wigs, and fetches
them out as easily. I should not be sur-
prised to see him some day put out the
head of a river-horse
; or come forth a
pewitt, or lapwing, some feathered metamor-

his queer visnomy-his bewildering costume
-all the strange things which he had raked
together-his serpentine rod, swagging about
in his pocket-Cleopatra's tear, and the rest
of his relics-O'Keefe's wild farce, and his
wilder commentary-till the passion of laugh-phosis.
ter, like grief in excess, relieved itself by its
own weight, inviting the sleep which in the
first instance it had driven away.

But I was not to escape so easily. No sooner did I fall into slumbers, than the same image, only more perplexing, assailed me in the shape of dreams. Not one Munden, but five hundred, were dancing before me, like the faces which, whether you will or no, come when you have been taking opiumall the strange combinations, which this strangest of all strange mortals ever shot his proper countenance into, from the day he came commissioned to dry up the tears of the town for the loss of the now almost forgotten Edwin. O for the power of the pencil to have fixed them when I awoke! A season or two since, there was exhibited a Hogarth gallery. I do not see why there should not be a Munden gallery. In richness and variety, the latter would not fall far short of the former.

There is one face of Farley, one face of Knight, one (but what a one it is!) of Liston; but Munden has none that you can properly

I have seen this gifted actor in Sir Christopher Curry-in old Dornton - diffuse a glow of sentiment which has made the pulse of a crowded theatre beat like that of one man; when he has come in aid of the pulpit, doing good to the moral heart of a people. I have seen some faint approaches to this sort of excellence in other players. But in the grand grotesque of farce, Munden stands out as single and unaccompanied as Hogarth. Hogarth, strange to tell, had no followers. The school of Munden began, and must end, with himself.

Can any man wonder, like him? can any man see ghosts, like him? or fight with his own shadow-"SESSA -as he does in that strangely-neglected thing, the Cobbler of Preston-where his alternations from the Cobbler to the Magnifico, and from the Magnifico to the Cobbler, keep the brain of the spectator in as wild a ferment, as if some Arabian Night were being acted before him. Who like him can throw, or ever attempted to throw, a preternatural interest over the commonest daily-life objects? A

table or a joint-stool, in his conception, rises His pots and his ladles are as grand and into a dignity equivalent to Cassiopeia's primal as the seething-pots and hooks seen chair. It is invested with constellatory im- in old prophetic vision. A tub of butter, portance. You could not speak of it with contemplated by him, amounts to a Platonic more deference, if it were mounted into the idea. He understands a leg of mutton in firmament. A beggar in the hands of its quiddity. He stands wondering, amid Michael Angelo, says Fuseli, rose the Patri- the common-place materials of life, like arch of Poverty. So the gusto of Munden primæval man with the sun and stars about antiquates and ennobles what it touches. him.

THE

LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA.