There it lay for months an object of pride to the possessor, who never failed to point it out to his visitors. But Mrs. Kean, far from sharing her husband's satisfaction, held the relic in disgust. One day, resolved no longer to endure its sight, she caught hold of it with a piece of paper and threw it over the wall into the next garden. That night Kean returned, as was his wont, very inebriated. He missed the bone. He stormed, raved, summoned the servants out of their beds, and searched every likely and unlikely spot. At last the conviction was forced upon him that it was gone. Sinking into a chair he exclaimed, with drunken lachrymoseness, "Mary, your son has lost a fortune. He was worth £10,000; now he is a beggar ?"

It may be remarked that if Kean contrived to extract a toe-bone, how was it that he did not discover the corpse to be headless? Mr. Procter, however, vouches for the truth of the story, but considers it to be doubtful whether the body exhumed was really that of Cooke.

CHAPTER VI.

SOME FAMOUS COMEDIANS.

Jack Bannister-His Acting in "The Children in the Wood" -Provincial Criticism-Dr. Syntax-" Bannister's Budget"Lewis-The Original of Jeremy Diddler-Edwin-His "Gags" "Peeping Tom"-Dicky Suett-His Death.

HERE is

RE is scarcely any other of our old actors

THERE

who is mentioned so lovingly as "Jack" BANNISTER; "Delightful Bannister!" Leigh Hunt calls him. "Jack Bannister and he (Suett)," writes Elia, "had the fortune to be more of personal favourites with the town than any actors before or after... 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." This was his great part, peculiarly adapted as it was to display that combination of tragedy and comedy, which was his chief excellence.

Walpole says it was one of the most admirable performances he ever saw, that his transports of joy and despair were incomparable, and his various countenances would be adapted to the pencil of Salvator Rosa. "He made me shed as many tears as I suppose the old original ballad did when I was six years old." Yet actors of the present day would find nothing in such a character beyond that of an ordinary melodrama; their predecessors were creators, who could clothe a meagre skeleton with flesh and render it a thing of delight and beauty, whereas they have enough to do to deliver the mere words of the author with point and effect.

During his lesseeship at Manchester, Elliston played a trick that justly reproved provincial selfconceit. Bannister being in the city, he conceived the joke of putting him in the bills for a small part in a comedy, under an assumed name, and announcing that between the play and the farce the gentleman would attempt a scene from "The Children in the Wood," after the manner of the celebrated Mr. John Bannister. On this evening he acted it in his best manner. But scarcely had he uttered three words when the audience began to hiss, and very soon there rose cries of "Off, off," and the hissing and clamour rose to such a height, that he was obliged to retire. On the Saturday, one of the newspapers declared it was the vilest attempt at imitation that had ever been offered to

the public!

JACK BANNister.

95

Bannister was the most admirable sailor ever seen; not the transpontine trouserhitching, tobacco-chewing monster, who talks as no human being ever talked, but the real "salt."

"Mr. Bannister," says Leigh Hunt, "is the first low comedian on the stage. Let an author present him with a humorous idea, whether it be of jollity of ludicrous distress, or of grave indifference, whether it be mock heroic, burlesque, or mimicry, and he embodies it with an instantaneous felicity."

His father, Charles Bannister, was a good actor and singer under Foote's management. John was born in 1760. He was intended for an artist, and was a student at the Royal Academy; but he preferred the stage, and appeared at the Haymarket as Dick, in "The Apprentice," for his father's benefit in 1778.

Tragedy, however, was his ambition, and Garrick trained him with great care in the part of Zaphna, in "Mahomet." But Jack soon discovered that comedy was his destiny. To his other talents was added an admirable one for mimicry. In 1807, he went through the country with a Mathews' kind of entertainment called "Bannister's Budget," consisting of imitations and characters. He always

kept up his associations with artists and was himself clever as a caricaturist; he is said to have first suggested to Rowlandson his idea of Dr. Syntax.

He had a flexibility of feature, an eye and a power of facial expression only surpassed by Garrick. He was as delightful off the stage as on, and had such wit, geniality, and good-nature that it would have been impossible for an anchorite to have been dull in his presence. He quitted the stage in 1815, but lived in the enjoyment of his ample means until 1835. He lies buried with his father in St. Martin's

in-the-Fields.

LEWIS, the airiest and most mercurial of comedians, the most restless of human beings, "the sprightly, the gay, the exhilirating, the genteel," was Harry Woodward's successor. During his youth he played both in tragedy and comedy, but afterwards entirely confined himself to the latter. His great charm was his animal spirits; he was the original personator of nearly all Reynolds' and O'Keefe's rattling, harebrained, and impossibly-lively heroes, and of Kenney's still famous Jeremy Diddler. Like Paul Pry, that most amusing of impudent adventurers was drawn from life. The original was a gentleman who had obtained the cognomen of "Half-crown Bibb." He never met an acquaintance without asking a loan, in the very words of his great stagedouble: "Have you got such a thing as ninepence about you?" Meeting Morton, the dramatic author, in the street one day, he requested the loan of five shillings. "I have only three and sixpence in change," replied the victim, handing it to him.