is not obliged to out-talk his own trumpets, neither is it always necessary for him to make his exit in a passion. I confess that whilst our two overgrown theatres were standing, this art, of which I have been speaking, was no easy attainment; yet I think our chief Tragedian Mr. Kemble fully un derstood the importance of it, and practised it successfully; though vehement exertion of the lungs, unhappily for him, was what his frame could ill endure, yet by distinct articulation, and a certain high-pitched modulation, approaching in acuteness to what is called a falsetta, he was perfectly well heard in all parts of the theatre, and by never suffering his voice to sink from the sharpness of its key into those guttural and growling flats, in which his sister has accustomed herself to pitch her inaudible pathetic, he affords a striking proof to what great and judicious account even the sparing gifts of nature may be turned by the economy of art. How very few possess that delicacy of ear, which should regulate the voice in reading or reciting to few or many, in a large space or a small! Neither Henderson, nor even Garrick, understood this secret, of distinguishing rightly between a play-house and a private room. Of the two, Henderson was the more ungovernably above pitch; yet Garrick had indulged himself in the habit of bawling out to servants and stage-retainers, till he broke the finer notes of his natural organ, and only spared the clapper of his bell. Let Mr. Pope be never strenuous but when he has something sturdy to contend with, and be in every part as true to nature, as he is in Shakespear's Henry the Eighth, he may defy criticism. Mr. Hunt has laid down many admirable rules of general utility let me add one more, and if I particularly address it to Mr. Pope, I am persuaded his good sense will take it in good part: the advice I would offer to him is not to take Horace's word upon trust, and be so free to sob and show the signal of his sorrows to the spectators, lest they should not be in the humour to obey it, and leave him perhaps to the solitary self-indulgence of bewailing (which some may interpret as applauding) his own exquisite emotions. I have seen Barry weep; but there were not many dry eyes in the theatre when his gave way; and Henderson I have reason to believe never shed tears, but when he could not help it. Therefore I am tempted to advise Mr. Pope and Mr. Elliston, and all those whimpering gentlemen, and whining ladies, who affect a pleonasm in the pathetic, to distrust that Horatian maxim, -Si vis me flere, dolendum est Artificial stammerings, and blubberings and strugglings for breath, as if fighting against suffocation, are dangerous experiments, for they are in general merely tricks of the stage, open to discovery, and hardly to be ranked above the manual joke, of sawing a truncheon, that it may shiver with a stroke upon the shoulders of an under-actor, who manfully endures the blow because he saw the carpenter disarm the weapon. The author of these Essays is a critic, friendly to the stage, when he points out some general errors and offences against local propriety in the mass of our performers, which he sums up under the following charges of Glancing at the boxesAdjusting the dress-Telling the audience their soliloquiesWearing their hats in rooms, and.. Not wearing them in the open air. There is no denying that these faults are glaring, and demand correction: The glances at the boxes, and adjustments of the dress, are impertinent and unpardonably out of place. The mismanagement of soliloquies leaves offenders without excuse, now that they have both the precept of Mr. Hunt, and the example of Mr. Kemble, to instruct them in a better practice: As to their intolerable misapplication of hats, it is an indecorum, that exposes them to every body's censure; when they wear them in a gentleman's chamber, his footman should be called to kick them out of it; but when in a lady's, the hangman should be summoned to perform his office. Such violations of propriety are not to be endured : let them be corrected, and I shall be ready and content to agree with Mr. Hunt, that our Royal Stages have in no period of my remembrance been more amply furnished with performers, capable of doing justice to the best writers, and something more than justice warrants to the bad. At the same time it is of a long succession of departed favourites, eminent in their profession, that I could speak within the period of nearly seventy years. To have seen them, and retain a lively recollection of their persons and performances, is amongst the few gratifications, which Time bestows upon old age in compensation for much better comforts, which he takes away. I can imagine that I sit and hear the deep-toned and declamatory roll of Quin's sonorous recitation; solemn, articulate and round; dealt out with that pedantic magisterial air, as if he were a professor lecturing his pupils ex cathedra, and not an actor addressing his audience from the stage. I can fancy that I see him sawing the air with his unwieldy arm, whilst the line laboured as he mouthed it forth. A vast full-bottomed perri. wig, bepowdering a velvet coat embroidered down the seams, a long cravat, square-toed high-heeled shoes, and rolled silk stockings, clothing two sturdy legs, that rivalled ballustrades, were in his day the equipments of a modern tragic hero; whilst the hoop and shape (as we see it represented by Hogarth) surmounted by a high-plumed helmet over the aforesaid full-bottom, denoted the Roman or Grecian chief in his antient. and appropiate costuma. - We saw those things without amazement then. Let me not however fail to recollect, that this Atlas of the stage could stand under the enormous globe of Falstaff's paunch, and carry himself through that eccentric character with consummate pleasantry. When I saw him once in that part I was very young, and of course yery easily amused; but it was in |