Aguecheek the stage lost in him! Lovegrove, who came nearest to the old actors, revived the character some few seasons ago, and made it sufficiently grotesque; but Dodd was it, as it came out of nature's hands. It might be said to remain in puris naturalibus. In expressing slowness of apprehension this actor surpassed all others. You could see the first dawn of an idea stealing slowly over his countenance, climbing up by little and little, with a painful process, till it cleared up at last to the fulness of a twilight conception-its highest meridian. He seemed to keep back his intellect, as some have had the power to retard their pulsation. The balloon takes less time in filling, than it took to cover the expansion of his broad moony face over all its quarters with expression. A glimmer of understanding would appear in a corner of his eye, and for lack of fuel go out again. A part of his forehead would catch a little intelligence, and be a long time in communicating it to the remainder.

I am ill at dates, but I think it is now better than five-and-twenty years ago, that walking in the gardens of Gray's Inn-they were then far finer than they are now the accursed Verulam Buildings had not encroached upon all the east side of them, cutting out delicate green crankles, and shouldering away one or two of the stately alcoves of the terrace--the survivor stands gaping and relationless as if it remembered its brother-they are still the best gardens of any of the Inns of Court, my beloved Temple not forgotten-have the gravest character, their aspect being altogether reverend and law-breathingBacon has left the impress of his foot upon their gravel walks-taking my afternoon solace on a summer day upon the aforesaid terrace, a comely sad personage came towards me, whom, from his grave air and deportment, I judged to be one of the Benchers of the Inn. He had a serious thoughtful forehead, and seemed to be in meditations of mortality. As I have an instinctive awe of old Benchers, I was passing him with that sort of subindicative token of respect which one is apt to demonstrate towards a venerable stranger, and which rather denotes an inclination to greet him, than any positive motion of the body to that effect a species of humility and will-worship which I observe, nine times out of ten, rather puzzles than pleases the person it is offered to when the face turning full upon me strangely identified itself with that of Dodd. Upon close inspection I was not mistaken. But could this sad

thoughtful countenance be the same vacant face of folly which I had hailed so often under circumstances of gaiety; which I had never seen without a smile, or recognized but as the usher of mirth; that looked out so formally flat in Foppington, so frothily pert in Tattle, so impotently busy in Backbite; so blankly divested of all meaning, or resolutely expressive of none, in Acres, in Fribble, and a thousand agreeable impertinences? Was this the face-full of thought and carefulness--that had so often divested itself at will of every trace of either to give me diversion, to clear my cloudy face for two or three hours. at least of its furrows? Was this the face-manly, sober, intelligent,-which I had so often despised, made mocks at, made merry with? The remembrance of the freedoms which I had taken with it came upon me with a reproach of insult. I could have asked it pardon. I thought it looked upon me with a sense of injury. There is something strange as well as sad in seeing actorsyour pleasant fellows particularly-subjected to and suffering the common lottheir fortunes, their casualties, their deaths, seem to belong to the scene, their actions to be amenable to poetic justice only. We can hardly connect them with more awful responsibilities. The death of this fine actor took place shortly after this meeting. He had quitted the stage some months; and as I learned afterwards, had been in the habit of resorting daily to these gardens almost to the day of his decease. In these serious walks probably he was divesting himself of many scenic and some real vanities-weaning himself from the frivolities of the lesser and greater theatre - doing gentle penance for a life of no very reprehensible fooleries, --taking off by degrees the buffoon mask which he

might feel he had worn too long-and rehearsing for a more solemn cast of part. Dying, he "put on the weeds of Dominic.'

[I do not know a more mortifying thing than to be conscious of a foregone delight, with a total oblivion of the person and manner which conveyed it. In dreams, I often stretch and strain after the countenance of Edwin, whom I once saw in Peeping Tom. I cannot catch a feature of him. He is no more to me than Nokes or Pinkethman. Parsons, and, still more, Dodd, were near being lost to me till I was refreshed with their portraits (fine treat) the other day at Mr. Matthews's gallery at Highgate; which, with the exception of the Hogarth pictures, a few years since exhibited in Pall Mall, was the most delightful collection I ever gained admission to. There hang the players, in their single persons and in grouped scenes, from the Restoration,-Bettertons, Booths, Garricks,-justifying the prejudices which we entertain for them; the Bracegirdles, the Mountforts, and the Oldfields, fresh as Cibber has described them; the Woffington (a true Hogarth) upon a couch, dallying and dangerous; the screen scene in Brinsley's famous comedy; with Smith and Mrs. Abingdon, whom I have not seen; and the rest, whom, having seen, I see still there. There is Henderson, unrivalled in Comus, whom I saw at secondhand in the elder Harley; Harley, the rival of Holman, in Horatio; Holman, with the bright glittering teeth, in Lothario, and the deep pavior's sighs in Romeo, the jolliest person ("our son is fat ") of any Hamlet I have yet seen, with the most laudable attempts (for a personable man) at looking melancholy; and Pope, the abdicated monarch of tragedy and comedy, in Harry the Eighth and Lord Townley. There hang the two Aickins, brethren in mediocrity; Wroughton, who in Kitely seemed to have forgotten that in prouder days he had personated Alexander; the specious form of John Palmer, with the special effrontery of Bobby; Bensley, with the trumpet-tongue; and little Quick (the retired Dioclesian of Islington), with his squeak like a Bart'lemew fiddle. There are fixed, cold as in life, the immovable features of Moody, who, afraid of o'erstepping Nature, sometimes stopped short of her; and the restless fidgetiness of Lewis, who, with no such fears, not seldom leaped o' the other side. There hang Farren and Whitfield, and Burton and Phillimore, names of small account in those times, but which, remembered now, or casually recalled "drown by the sight of an old play-bill, with their associated recordations, can an eye unused to flow." There too hangs, not far removed from them in death, the graceful plainness of the first Mrs. Pope, with a voice unstrung by age, but which in her better days must have competed with the silver tones of Barry himself, so enchanting in decay do I remember it,- of all her lady parts, exceeding herself in the Lady Quakeress (there earth; touched heaven!) of O'Keefe, when she played it to the "merry cousin' of Lewis; and Mrs. Mallocks, the sensiblest of viragoes; and Miss Pope, a gentlewoman ever, to the verge of ungentility, with Churchill's compliment still burnishing upon her gay Honeycomb lips. There are the two Bannisters, and Sedgwick, and Kelly, and Dignum (Diggy), and the bygone features of Mrs. Ward, matchless in Lady Loverule; and the collective majesty of the whole Kemble family; and (Shakspere's woman) Dora Jordan; and, by her, two Antics, who, in former and in latter days, have chiefly beguiled us of our griefs; whose portraits we shall strive to recall, for the sympathy of those who may not have had the benefit of viewing the matchless Highgate collection.

* Dodd was a man of reading, and left at his death a choice collection of old English literature. I should judge him to have been a man of wit. I know one instance of an impromptu which no length of study could have bettered. My merry friend, Jem White, had seen him one evening in Aguecheek, and, recognizing Dodd the next day in Fleet Street, was irresistibly impelled to take off his hat and salute him as the identical Knight of the preceding evening with a "Save you, Sir Andrew." Dodd, not at all disconcerted at this unusual address from a stranger, with a courteous half-rebuking wave of the hand, put him off with an Away, Fool."

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O for a "slip-shod muse," to celebrate in numbers, loose and shambling as himself, the merits and the person of Mr. Richard Suett, Comedian !] If few can remember Dodd, many yet living will not easily forget the pleasant creature, who in those days enacted the part of the Clown to Dodd's Sir Andrew.-Richard, or rather Dicky Suett-for so in his lifetime he delighted to be called, and time hath ratified the appellation-lieth buried on the north side of the cemetery of Holy Paul, to whose service his nonage and tender years were dedicated. There are who do yet remember him at that periodhis pipe clear and harmonious. He would often speak of his chorister days, when he was "cherub Dicky."

What clipped his wings, or made it expedient that he should exchange the holy for the profane state; whether he had last his good voice (his best recommendation to that office), like Sir John, "with hallooing and singing of anthems;" or whether he was adjudged to lack something, even in those early years, of the gravity indispensable to an occupation which professeth to commerce with the skies"-I could never rightly learn; but we find him, after the probation of a twelvemonth or so, reverting to a secular condition, and become one of us.

I think he was not altogether of that timber out of which cathedral seats and sounding-boards are hewed. But if a glad heart-kind and therefore gladbe any part of sanctity, then might the robe of Motley, with which he invested himself with so much humility after his deprivation, and which he wore so long with so much blameless satisfaction to himself and to the public, be accepted for a surplice - his white stole, and albe.

The first fruits of his secularization was an engagement upon the boards of Old Drury, at which theatre he commenced, as I have been told, with adopting the manner of Parsons in old men's characters. At the period in which most of us knew him, he was no more an imitator than he was in any true sense himself inimitable.

He was the Robin Good-Fellow of the stage. He came in to trouble all things with a welcome perplexity, himself no whit troubled for the matter. He was known, like Puck, by his note-Ha! Ha! Ha!-sometimes deepening to Ho! Ho! Ho! with an irresistible accession derived perhaps remotely from his ecclesiastical education, foreign to his prototype of,-O La! Thousands of hearts yet respond to the chuckling O La! of Dicky Suett, brought back to their remembrance by the faithful transcript of his friend Mathews's mimicry. The "force of nature could no farther go." He drolled upon the stock of these two syllables richer than the cuckoo.

Care, that troubles all the world, was forgotten in his composition. Had he had but two grains (nay, half a grain) of it, he could never have supported himself upon those two spider's strings, which served him (in the latter part of his unmixed existence) as legs. A doubt or a scruple must have made him totter, a sigh have puffed him down; the weight of a frown had staggered him, a wrinkle made him lose his balance. But on he went, scrambling upon those airy stilts of his, with Robin Good-Fellow, "thorough brake, thorough briar," reckless of a scratched face or a torn doublet.

Shakspere foresaw him, when he framed his fools and jesters. They have all the true Suett stamp, a loose and shambling gait, a slippery tongue, this last the ready midwife to a without-pain-delivered jest; in words, light as air, venting truths deep as the centre; with idlest rhymes tagging conceit when busiest, singing with Lear in the tempest, or Sir Toby at the buttery-hatch.

Jack Bannister and he had the fortune to be more of personal favourites with the town than any actors before or after. The difference, 1 take it, was this-Jack was more beloved for his sweet, good-natured, moral pretensions. Dicky was more liked for his sweet, good-natured, no pretensions at all. Your whole conscience stirred with Bannister's performance of Walter in the

Children in the Wood-but Dicky seemed like a thing, as Shakspeare says of Love, too young to know what conscience is. He puts us into Vesta's days. Evil fled before him-not as from Jack, as from an antagonist,-but because it could not touch him, any more than a cannon-ball a fly. He was delivered from the burthen of that death; and when Death came himself, not in metaphor, to fetch Dicky, it is recorded of him by Robert Palmer, who kindly watched his exit, that he received the last stroke, neither varying his accustomed tranquillity, nor tune, with the simple exclamation, worthy to have been recorded in his epitaph-O La! O La! Bobby!

The elder Palmer (of stage-treading celebrity) commonly played Sir Toby in those days; but there is a solidity of wit in the jests of that half-Falstaff which he did not quite fill out. He was as much too showy as Moody (who sometimes took the part) was dry and sottish. In sock or buskin there was an air

of swaggering gentility about Jack Palmer. He was a gentleman with a slight infusion of the footman. His brother Bob (of recenter memory), who was his shadow in everything while he lived, and dwindled into less than a shadow afterwards-was a gentleman with a little stronger infusion of the latter ingredient; that was all. It is amazing how a little of the more or less makes a difference in these things. When you saw Bobby in the Duke's Servant,* you said, what a pity such a pretty fellow was only a servant. When you saw Jack figuring in Captain Absolute, you thought you could trace his promotion to some lady of quality who fancied the handsome fellow in his top-knot, and had bought him a commission. Therefore Jack in Dick Amlet was insuperable.

Jack had two voices,-both plausible, hypocritical, and insinuating; but his secondary or supplemental voice still more decisively histrionic than his common one. It was reserved for the spectator; and the dramatis person were supposed to know nothing at all about it. The lies of young Wilding, and the sentiments in Joseph Surface, were thus marked out in a sort of italics to the audience. This secret correspondence with the company before the curtain (which is the bane and death of tragedy) has an extremely happy effect in some kinds of comedy, in the more highly artificial comedy of Congreve or of Sheridan especially, where the absolute sense of reality (so indispensable to scenes of interest) not required, or would rather interfere to diminish your pleasure. The fact is, you do not believe in such characters as Surface-the villain of artificial comedy-even while you read or see them. If you did, they would shock and not divert you. When Ben, in Love for Love, returns from sea, the following exquisite dialogue occurs at his first meeting with his father:

Sir Sampson. Thou hast been many a weary league, Ben, since I saw thee. Ben. Ey, ey, been! Been far enough, an that be all.-Well, father, and at home? how does brother Dick, and brother Val?

Sir Sampson. Dick! body o' me, Dick has been dead these two years. word when you were at Leghorn.

how do all I writ you

Ben. Mess, that's true; Marry, I had forgot. Dick's dead, as you say-Well, and how?-I have a many questions to ask you

Here is an instance of insensibility which in real life would be revolting, or rather in real life could not have co-existed with the warm-hearted temperament of the character. But when you read it in the spirit with which such playful selections and specious combinations rather than strict metaphrases of nature should be taken, or when you saw Bannister play it, it neither did, nor does, wound the moral sense at all. For what is Ben-the pleasant sailor which Bannister gives us - but a piece of satire-a creation of Congreve's fancy-a dreamy combination of all the accidents of a sailor's character-his

* High Life Below Stairs.

contempt of money-his credulity to women-with that necessary estrangement from home which it is just within the verge of credibility to suppose might produce such an hallucination as is here described. We never think the worse of Ben for it, or feel it as a stain upon his character. But when an actor comes, and instead of the delightful phantom-the creature dear to halfbelief-which Bannister exhibited-displays before our eyes a downright concretion of a Wapping sailor-a jolly warm-hearted Jack Tar-and nothing else-when instead of investing it with a delicious confusedness of the head, and a veering undirected goodness of purpose-he gives to it a downright daylight understanding, and a full consciousness of its actions; thrusting forward the sensibilities of the character with a pretence as if it stood upon nothing else, and was to be judged by them alone-we feel the discord of the thing; the scene is disturbed; a real man has got in among the dramatis persona, and puts them out. We want the sailor turned out. We feel that his true place is not behind the curtain but in the first or second gallery.

Distant Correspondents.

IN A LETTER TO B. F. ESQ., AT SYDNEY, NEW SOUTH WALES. (The London Magazine, March, 1822.)

["B. F." meant Barron Field (already twice named in these notes) who, for some years, held in New South Wales an important judicial appointment, and who eventually became the Chief Justice of Gibraltar. Sally W-r stood for Sally Winter. “J. W." was Elia's old schoolfellow, James White, author of an ingenious little book purporting to be the "Letters of Sir John Falstaff, Knight," a curiosity of literature in the composition of which, according to Southey's statement, Charles Lamb himself was James White's collaborateur.]

My dear F.-When I think how welcome the sight of a letter from the world where you were born must be to you in that strange one to which you have been transplanted, I feel some compunctious visitings at my long silence. But, indeed, it is no easy effort to set about a correspondence at our distance. The weary world of waters between us oppresses the imagination. It is difficult to conceive how a scrawl of mine should ever stretch across it. It is a sort of presumption to expect that one's thoughts should live so far. It is like writing for posterity; and reminds me of one of Mrs. Rowe's superscriptions, "Alcander to Strephon, in the Shades." Cowley's Post-Angel is no more than would be expedient in such an intercourse. One drops a packet at Lombard Street, and in twenty-four hours a friend in Cumberland gets it as fresh as if it came in ice. It is only like whispering through a long trumpet. But suppose a tube let down from the moon, with yourself at one end, and the man at the other; it would be some balk to the spirit of conversation, if you knew that the dialogue exchanged with that interesting theosophist would take two or three revolutions of a higher luminary in its passage. Yet for ought I know, you may be some parasangs nigher that primitive idea-Plato's man-than we in England here have the honour to reckon ourselves.

Epistolary matter usually compriseth three topics; news, sentiment, and

puns.

In the latter, I include all non-serious subjects; or subjects serious in