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knowledge of what is good for the people, they had as great a care for their interest as they have for their own; if they were seated above the world, sympathizing with their welfare, but not feeling the passions of men, receiving neither good nor hurt from them, but bestowing their benefits as free gifts on them, they might then rule over them like another Providence. But this is not the case. Coriolanus is unwilling that the Senate should show their "cares" for the people, lest their "cares" should be construed into "fears,' to the subversion of all due authority; and he is no sooner disappointed in his schemes to deprive the people not only of the cares of the state, but of all power to redress themselves, than Volumnia is made madly to exclaim,

"Now the red pestilence strike all trades in Rome,

And occupations perish."

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[Mrs. Hunt, we dare say, was of the same opinion the other day when she read the account of the Spa-fields meeting.3] This is but natural: it is but natural for a mother to have more regard for her son than for a whole city: but then the city should be left to take some care of itself. The care of the state cannot, we here see, be safely entrusted to maternal affection, or to the domestic charities of high life. The great have private feelings of their own, to which the interests of humanity and justice must curtsy. Their interests are so far from being the same as those of the community, that they are in direct and necessary opposition to them; their power is at the expense of our weakness; their riches, of our poverty; their pride, of our degradation; their splendour, of our wretchedness; their tyranny, of our servitude. If they had the superior intelligence ascribed to them (which they have not) it would only render them so much more formidable; and from gods would convert them into devils.

3

1 Coriolanus, III, i, 137.

2 Ibid., IV, i, 13-4.

Alluding to the riots on December 2, and the meeting addressed by "Orator Hunt."

The whole dramatic moral of Coriolanus is, that those who have little shall have less, and that those who have much shall take all that others have left. The people are poor, therefore they ought to be starved. They are slaves, therefore they ought to be beaten. They work hard, therefore, they ought to be treated like beasts of burden. They are ignorant, therefore they ought not to be allowed to feel that they want food, or clothing, or rest, that they are enslaved, oppressed, and miserable. This is the logic of the imagination and the passions; which seek to aggrandize what excites admiration, and to heap contempt on misery, to raise power into tyranny, and to make tyranny absolute; to thrust down that which is low still lower, and to make wretches desperate: to exalt magistrates into kings, kings into gods; to degrade subjects to the rank of slaves, and slaves to the condition of brutes. The history of mankind is a romance, a mask, a tragedy constructed upon the principles of poetical justice; it is a noble or royal hunt, in which what is sport to the few, is death to the many, and in which the spectators halloo and encourage the strong to set upon the weak, and cry havoc in the chase, though they do not share in the spoil. We may depend upon it, that what men delight to read in books, they will put in practice in reality.

Mr. Kemble in the part of Coriolanus was as great as ever. Miss O'Neill as Volumnia was not so great as Mrs. Siddons. There is a fleshiness, if we may so say, about her whole manner, voice, and person, which does not suit the character of the Roman Matron. One of the most amusing things in the representation of this play is the contrast between Kemble and little Simmons.1 The former seems as if he would gibbet the latter on his nose, he looks so lofty. The fidgetting, uneasy, insignificant gestures of Simmons are perhaps a little caricatured; and Kemble's supercilious airs and nonchalance remind one of the unaccountable

1 Simmons was a Citizen.

abstracted air, the contracted eye-brows and suspended chin of a man who is just going to sneeze.

[There have been two new farces this week: one at each house. One was saved and one was damned. One was justly damned, and the other unjustly saved.

Nota Bene, or The Two Dr. Funguses,' shot up and disappeared in one night, notwithstanding the inimitable acting and well-oiled humour of Oxberry in one scene, where he makes bumpkin forward love to Mrs. Orger in a style. equal to Liston.

2

Love and Toothache, though there is neither love nor toothache in it, is as disagreeable as the one and as foolish as the other. One farce consists of a succession of low incidents without a plot, and the other is one tedious and improbable incident without a plot. The changing of the two signs, or Nota Benes, of the two Funguses, barber and doctor, in the first, is better than any thing in the last. The only difference is, that at the one house they contrive to have their pieces cast, and get them condemned at the other. Yet this is a saying without any meaning; for in the present case they were both got up as well as they could be. We almost despair of ever seeing another good farce. Mr. H- thou wert damned. Bright shone the morning on the play-bills that announced thy appearance, and the streets were filled with the buzz of persons asking one another if they would go to see Mr. H————, and answering that they would certainly; but before the night the gaiety, not of the author, but of his friends and the town, was eclipsed, for thou wert damned! Hadst thou been anonymous, thou mightest have been immortal! But thou didst come to an untimely end, for thy tricks and for want of a better name

1 By C. T. Hookham. Produced at Drury Lane, December 12, and repeated the following evening. Oxberry was Scammony, and Mrs. Orger Caroline.

2 Love and the Toothache, by John Fawcett, was produced at Covent Garden, December 13, and repeated the following evening.

to pass them off1 (as the old joke of Divine Right passes current under the alias of Legitimacy)—and since that time nothing worth naming has been offered to the stage!]

3

THE MAN OF THE WORLD.

Covent-Garden, December 29, 1816.

MR. HENRY JOHNSTON (from the Glasgow Theatre) who came out some time ago in Sir Archy MacSarcasm,2 with much applause, appeared on Friday, in Sir Pertinax MacSycophant. During the first acts he went through this highly, but finely coloured part, with great spirit and force: but in the midst of his account to his son Egerton, of the manner in which he rose in the world by booing, and by marrying an old dowager, "like a surgeon's skeleton in a glass-case," a certain disapprobation, not of the actor, but of the sentiments of the character, manifested itself through the house, which at this season of the year is not of a very refined composition; and some one cried out from the gallery for "another play." So little do the vulgar know of courts and the great world, that they are even shocked and disgusted at the satirical representation of them on the stage. This unexpected interruption given to the actor in

This passage is quoted by Hazlitt in his essay "On Great and Little Things" (Table Talk, pp. 323-4), and by Lamb in the first printed edition of the farce (Works, 2 vols. 1818—ii. 213). The single performance took place at Drury Lane, December 10, 1806.

2 Henry Erskine Johnston (1777-1830), called the Scottish Roscius, made his début at Covent Garden October 23, 1797, and reappeared at that theatre, after several years' absence, in Macklin's Love à la Mode, December 10, 1816.

3 H. Johnston first played in The Man of the World on December 27. C. Kemble was Egerton.

4"A skeleton in a surgeon's glass-case "-Man of the World, III, i.

the most prominent scene of the play, operated to damp his spirits considerably, nor did he rally completely again for the rest of the evening.

This is the second time that we have seen an actor fail in this character, not by any fault in himself, but by the fault of the managers, in bringing them out in this part in the holiday season. The other was Mr. Bibby last year,1 certainly not inferior to Mr. Johnston in the conception or delineation of the sordid, gross, wily Scotchman: but who was equally or more unsuccessful, from the unintelligibility of the Scotch dialect and sentiments to the untutored and unclerkly" Christmas visitants. Upon the entrance indeed of Lord Castlereagh and some company of the higher classes, into the Prince's box, Mr. Johnston seemed to recover himself a little, and to appeal with more confidence from the ignorance of the rabble to these more judicious appreciators of the merits of his delineation of Macklin's idea of a modern statesman.

We wonder the managers of either theatre ever bring out a comedy relating to the artificial manners of high life, on occasions like the present. They ought either to have a tragedy and a pantomime, or two pantomimes the same evening; or a melo-drama, a puppet-show, and a pantomime. The common people like that which strikes their senses or their imagination: they do not like Comedy, because, if it is genteel, they do not understand the subject matter of which it treats-and if it relates to low manners and incidents, it has no novelty to recommend it. They like the dazzling and the wonderful. One of the objections constantly made by some persons who sat near us in the pit, to the play of The Man of the World, was, that the same scene continued through the whole play. This was a great disappointment to the pantomime appetite for rapid and wonderful changes of scenery, with which our dramatic novices had come fully prepared.

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April 16, 1816-not “last year -see p. 194 ante.

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