Ad Mariulam suam Autor
Moverunt bella olim Helenæ decor atque venustas
Europen inter frugiferamque Asiam.
Tam bona, quam tu, tam prudens, sin illa fuisset,
Ad lites issent Africa et America!
Which, in humble imitation of mine author's peculiar poverty of stile, I have ventured thus to render into English:—
The Author to his Moggy
For love's illustrious cause, and Helen's charms,
All Europe and all Asia rush'd to arms.
Had she with these thy polish'd sense combin'd,
All Afric and America had join'd!
The happy idea of an American war undertaken in the cause of beauty ought certainly to recommend the author's memory to the countrymen of Madison and Jefferson; and the bold anticipation of the discovery of that Continent in the time of the Trojan War is a flight beyond the Sibyll's books.
IX.—[DRYDEN AND COLLIER]
(1813)
The different way in which the same story may be told by different persons was never more strikingly illustrated than by the manner in which the celebrated Jeremy Collier has described the effects of Timotheus's music upon Alexander, in the Second Part of his Essays. We all know how Dryden has treated the subject. Let us now hear his great contemporary and antagonist:—"Timotheus, a Grecian," says Collier, "was so great a Master, that he could make a Man storm and swagger like a Tempest. And then, by altering the Notes and the Time, he would take him down again, and sweeten his Humour in a trice. One Time, when Alexander was at Dinner, this Man play'd him a Phrygian Air: The Prince immediately rises, snatches up his Lance, and puts himself into a Posture of Fighting. And the Retreat was no sooner sounded by the Change of the Harmony, but his Arms were grounded, and his Fire extinct; and he sat down as orderly as if he had come from one of Aristotle's Lectures. I warrant you Demosthenes would have been flourishing about such a Business a long Hour, and may be not have done it neither. But Timotheus had a nearer Cut to the Soul: He could neck a Passion at a Stroke, and lay it Asleep. Pythagoras once met with a Parcel of drunken Fellows, who were likely to be troublesome enough. He presently orders the Musick to play Grave, and chop into a Dorian: Upon this, they all threw away their Garlands, and were as sober and as shame-faced as one would wish."—It is evident that Dryden, in his inspired Ode, and Collier in all this pudder of prose, meant the same thing. But what a work does the latter make with his "necking a passion at his stroke," "making a man storm and swagger like a tempest," and then "taking him down and sweetening his humour in a trice." What in Dryden is "Softly sweet in Lydian measures," Collier calls "chopping into a Dorian."—This Collier was the same who, in his Biographical Dictionary, says of Shakespeare, that "though his genius generally was jocular, and inclining to festivity, yet he could when he pleased be as serious as any body."
X.—PLAY-HOUSE MEMORANDA
(1813)
I once sat in the Pit of Drury-lane Theatre next to a blind man, who, I afterwards learned, was a street musician, well known about London. The play was Richard the Third, and it was curious to observe the interest which he took in every successive scene, so far more lively than could be perceived in any of the company around him. At those pathetic interviews between the Queen and Duchess of York, after the murder of the children, his eyes (or rather the places where eyes should have been) gushed out tears in torrents, and he sat intranced in attention, while every one about him was tittering, partly at him, and partly at the grotesque figures and wretched action of the women, who had been selected by managerial taste to personate those royal mourners. Having no drawback of sight to impair his sensibilities, he simply attended to the scene, and received its unsophisticated impression. So much the rather her celestial light shone inward. I was pleased with an observation which he made, when I asked him how he liked Kemble, who played Richard. I should have thought (said he) that that man had been reading something out of a book, if I had not known that I was in a play-house.
I was once amused in a different way by a knot of country people who had come to see a play at that same Theatre. They seemed perfectly inattentive to all the best performers for the first act or two, though the piece was admirably played, but kept poring in the play-bill, and were evidently watching for the appearance of one, who was to be the source of supreme delight to them that night. At length the expected actor arrived, who happened to be in possession of a very insignificant part, not much above a mule [? mute]. I saw their faint attempt at raising a clap on his appearance, and their disappointment at not being seconded by the audience in general. I saw them try to admire and to find out something very wonderful in him, and wondering all the while at the moderate sensation he produced. I saw their pleasure and their interest subside at last into flat mortification, when the riddle was at once unfolded by my recollecting that this performer bore the same name with an actor, then in the acme of his celebrity, at Covent-Garden, but who lately finished his theatrical and mortal career on the other side the Atlantic. They had come to see Mr. C——, but had come to the wrong house.
Is it a stale remark to say, that I have constantly found the interest excited at a play-house to bear an exact inverse proportion to the price paid for admission. Formerly, when my sight and hearing were more perfect, and my purse a little less so, I was a frequenter of the upper gallery in the old Theatres. The eager attention, the breathless listening, the anxiety not to lose a word, the quick anticipation of the significance of the scene (every sense kept as it were upon a sharp look out), which are exhibited by the occupiers of those higher and now almost out-of-sight regions (who, going seldom to a play, cannot afford to lose any thing by inattention), suffer some little diminution, as you descend to the lower or two-shilling ranks; but still the joy is lively and unallayed, save [that] by some little incursion of manners, the expression of it is expected to abate somewhat of its natural liveliness. The oaken plaudits of the trunkmaker would here be considered as going a little beyond the line.—In the pit first begins that accursed critical faculty, which, making a man the judge of his own pleasures, too often constitutes him the executioner of his own and others! You may see the jealousy of being unduly pleased, the suspicion of being taken in to admire; in short, the vile critical spirit, creeping and diffusing itself, and spreading from the wrinkled brows and cloudy eyes of the front row sages and newspaper reporters (its proper residence), till it infects and clouds over the thoughtless, vacant countenance, of John Bull tradesmen, and clerks of counting-houses, who, but for that approximation, would have been contented to have grinned without rule, and to have been pleased without asking why. The sitting next a critic is contagious. Still now and then, a genuine spectator is to be found among them, a shopkeeper and his family, whose honest titillations of mirth, and generous chucklings of applause, cannot wait or be at leisure to take the cue from the sour judging faces about them. Haply they never dreamed that there were such animals in nature as critics or reviewers; even