“Thy lisping prattle and thy mincing gait.
All thy false mimic fooleries I hate;
For thou art Folly’s counterfeit, and she
Who is right foolish hath the better plea;
Nature’s true Idiot I prefer to thee”

Cumberland.

[Spoken in the character of Nancy Lake, a girl eight years of age, who is drawn upon the stage in a child’s chaise by Samuel Hughes, her uncle’s porter.]

My brother Jack was nine in May, [5b]
And I was eight on New-year’s-day;
   So in Kate Wilson’s shop
Papa (he’s my papa and Jack’s)
Bought me, last week, a doll of wax,
   And brother Jack a top.

Well, after many a sad reproach,
They got into a hackney coach,
   And trotted down the street.
I saw them go: one horse was blind,
The tails of both hung down behind,
   Their shoes were on their feet.

At first I caught hold of the wing,
And kept away; but Mr. Thing-
   um bob, the prompter man,
Gave with his hand my chaise a shove,
And said, “Go on, my pretty love;
   Speak to ’em, little Nan.

“You’ve only got to curtsey, whisp-
er, hold your chin up, laugh, and lisp,
   And then you’re sure to take:
I’ve known the day when brats, not quite
Thirteen, got fifty pounds a night; [8]
   Then why not Nancy Lake?”

But while I’m speaking, where’s papa?
And where’s my aunt? and where’s mamma?
   Where’s Jack?  O, there they sit!
They smile, they nod; I’ll go my ways,
And order round poor Billy’s chaise,
   To join them in the pit.

And now, good gentlefolks, I go
To join mamma, and see the show;
   So, bidding you adieu,
I curtsey, like a pretty miss,
And if you’ll blow to me a kiss,
   I’ll blow a kiss to you.

III.
AN ADDRESS WITHOUT A PHŒNIX. [10a]

By S. T. P. [10b]

“This was looked for at your hand, and this was balked.”

What You Will.

What stately vision mocks my waking sense?
Hence, dear delusion, sweet enchantment, hence!
Ha! is it real?—can my doubts be vain?
It is, it is, and Drury lives again!
Around each grateful veteran attends,
Eager to rush and gratulate his friends,
Friends whose kind looks, retraced with proud delight,
Endear the past, and make the future bright:
Yes, generous patrons, your returning smile
Blesses our toils, and consecrates our pile.

   When last we met, Fate’s unrelenting hand
Already grasped the devastating brand;
Slow crept the silent flame, ensnared its prize,
Then burst resistless to the astonished skies.
The glowing walls, disrobed of scenic pride,
In trembling conflict stemmed the burning tide,
Till crackling, blazing, rocking to its fall,
Down rushed the thundering roof, and buried all!

IV.
CUI BONO?

By LORD B. [12a]

[LORD BYRON.]

[Lord Byron died 19th April, 1824, in his 37th year.]

I.

   Sated with home, of wife, of children tired,
   The restless soul is driven abroad to roam; [12b]
   Sated abroad, all seen, yet nought admired,
   The restless soul is driven to ramble home;
   Sated with both, beneath new Drury’s dome
   The fiend Ennui awhile consents to pine,
   There growls, and curses, like a deadly Gnome,
   Scorning to view fantastic Columbine,
Viewing with scorn and hate the nonsense of the Nine. [14]

II.

   Ye reckless dopes, who hither wend your way
   To gaze on puppets in a painted dome,
   Pursuing pastimes glittering to betray,
   Like falling stars in life’s eternal gloom,
   What seek ye here?  Joy’s evanescent bloom?
   Woe’s me! the brightest wreaths she ever gave
   Are but as flowers that decorate a tomb.
   Man’s heart, the mournful urn o’er which they wave,
Is sacred to despair, its pedestal the grave.

III.

   Has life so little store of real woes,
   That here ye wend to taste fictitious grief?
   Or is it that from truth such anguish flows,
   Ye court the lying drama for relief?
   Long shall ye find the pang, the respite brief:
   Or if one tolerable page appears
   In folly’s volume, ’tis the actor’s leaf,
   Who dries his own by drawing others’ tears,
And, raising present mirth, makes glad his future years.

   Albeit, how like Young Betty [15a] doth he flee!
   Light as the mote that daunceth in the beam,
   He liveth only in man’s present e’e;
   His life a flash, his memory a dream,
   Oblivious down he drops in Lethe’s stream.
   Yet what are they, the learned and the great?
   Awhile of longer wonderment the theme!
   Who shall presume to prophesy their date,
Where nought is certain, save the uncertainty of fate?

V.

   This goodly pile, upheaved by Wyatt’s toil,
   Perchance than Holland’s edifice [15b] more fleet,
   Again red Lemnos’ artisan may spoil:
   The fire-alarm and midnight drum may beat,
   And all bestrewed ysmoking at your feet!
   Start ye? perchance Death’s angel may be sent
   Ere from the flaming temple ye retreat:
   And ye who met, on revel idlesse bent,
May find, in pleasure’s fane, your grave and monument.

   Your debts mount high—ye plunge in deeper waste;
   The tradesman duns—no warning voice ye hear;
   The plaintiff sues—to public shows ye haste;
   The bailiff threats—ye feel no idle fear.
   Who can arrest your prodigal career?
   Who can keep down the levity of youth?
   What sound can startle age’s stubborn ear?
   Who can redeem from wretchedness and ruth
Men true to falsehood’s voice, false to the voice of truth?

   To thee, blest saint! who doffed thy skin to make
   The Smithfield rabble leap from theirs with joy,
   We dedicate the pile—arise! awake!—
   Knock down the Muses, wit and sense destroy
   Clear our new stage from reason’s dull alloy,
   Charm hobbling age, and tickle capering youth
   With cleaver, marrow-bone, and Tunbridge toy!
   While, vibrating in unbelieving tooth, [17]
Harps twang in Drury’s walls, and make her boards a booth.

VIII.

   For what is Hamlet, but a hare in March?
   And what is Brutus, but a croaking owl?
   And what is Rolla?  Cupid steeped in starch,
   Orlando’s helmet in Augustin’s cowl.
   Shakespeare, how true thine adage “fair is foul!”
   To him whose soul is with fruition fraught,
   The song of Braham is an Irish howl,
   Thinking is but an idle waste of thought,
And nought is everything, and everything is nought.

IX.

   Sons of Parnassus! whom I view above,
   Not laurel-crown’d, but clad in rusty black;
   Not spurring Pegasus through Tempè’s grove,
   But pacing Grub-street on a jaded hack;
   What reams of foolscap, while your brains ye rack,
   Ye mar to make again! for sure, ere long,
   Condemn’d to tread the bard’s time-sanction’d track,
   Ye all shall join the bailiff-haunted throng,
And reproduce, in rags, the rags ye blot in song.

   Is it for these ye rear this proud abode?
   Is it for these your superstition seeks
   To build a temple worthy of a god,
   To laud a monkey, or to worship leeks?
   Then be the stage, to recompense your freaks,
   A motley chaos, jumbling age and ranks,
   Where Punch, the lignum-vitæ Roscius, squeaks,
   And Wisdom weeps, and Folly plays his pranks,
And moody Madness laughs and hugs the chain he clanks.

V.
HAMPSHIRE FARMER’S ADDRESS.

To the gewgaw fetters of rhyme (invented by the monks to enslave the people) I have a rooted objection.  I have therefore written an address for your Theatre in plain, homespun, yeoman’s prose; in the doing whereof I hope I am swayed by nothing but an independent wish to open the eyes of this gulled people, to prevent a repetition of the dramatic bamboozling they have hitherto laboured under.  If you like what I have done, and mean to make use of it, I don’t want any such aristocratic reward as a piece of plate with two griffins sprawling upon it, or a dog and a jackass fighting for a ha’p’worth of gilt gingerbread, or any such Bartholomew-fair nonsense.  All I ask is that the door-keepers of your play-house may take all the sets of my Register [20] now on hand, and force every body who enters your doors to buy one, giving afterwards a debtor and creditor account of what they have received, post-paid, and in due course remitting me the money and unsold Registers, carriage-paid.

When persons address an audience from the stage, it is usual, either in words or gesture, to say, “Ladies and Gentlemen, your servant.”  If I were base enough, mean enough, paltry enough, and brute beast enough, to follow that fashion, I should tell two lies in a breath.  In the first place, you are not Ladies and Gentlemen, but I hope something better, that is to say, honest men and women; and in the next place, if you were ever so much ladies, and ever so much gentlemen, I am not, nor ever will be, your humble servant.  You see me here, most thinking people, by mere chance.  I have not been within the doors of a play-house before for these ten years; nor, till that abominable custom of taking money at the doors is discontinued, will I ever sanction a theatre with my presence.  The stage-door is the only gate of freedom in the whole edifice, and through that I made my way from Bagshaw’s [21] in Brydges Street, to accost you.  Look about you.  Are you not all comfortable?  Nay, never slink, mun; speak out, if you are dissatisfied, and tell me so before I leave town.  You are now (thanks to Mr. Whitbread) got into a large, comfortable house.  Not into a gimcrack-palace; not into a Solomon’s temple; not into a frost-work of Brobdignag filigree; but into a plain, honest, homely, industrious, wholesome, brown brick playhouse.  You have been struggling for independence and elbow-room these three years; and who gave it you?  Who helped you out of Lilliput?  Who routed you from a rat-hole five inches by four, to perch you in a palace?  Again and again I answer, Mr. Whitbread.  You might have sweltered in that place with the Greek name [22] till doomsday, and neither Lord Castlereagh, Mr. Canning, no, nor the Marquess Wellesley, would have turned a trowel to help you out!  Remember that.  Never forget that.  Read it to your children, and to your children’s children!  And now, most thinking people, cast your eyes over my head to what the builder (I beg his pardon, the architect) calls the proscenium.  No motto, no slang, no popish Latin, to keep the people in the dark.  No veluti in speculum.  Nothing in the dead languages, properly so called, for they ought to die, ay and be damned to boot!  The Covent Garden manager tried that, and a pretty business he made of it!  When a man says veluti in speculum, he is called a man of letters.  Very well, and is not a man who cries O. P. a man of letters too?  You ran your O. P. against his veluti in speculum, and pray which beat?  I prophesied that, though I never told any body.  I take it for granted, that every intelligent man, woman, and child, to whom I address myself, has stood severally and respectively in Little Russell Street, and cast their, his, her, and its eyes on the outside of this building before they paid their money to view the inside.  Look at the brick-work, English Audience!  Look at the brick-work!  All plain and smooth like a quakers’ meeting.  None of your Egyptian pyramids, to entomb subscribers’ capitals.  No overgrown colonnades of stone, [23a] like an alderman’s gouty legs in white cotton stockings, fit only to use as rammers for paving Tottenham Court Road.  This house is neither after the model of a temple in Athens, no, nor a temple in Moorfields, but it is built to act English plays in: and, provided you have good scenery, dresses, and decorations, I daresay you wouldn’t break your hearts if the outside were as plain as the pikestaff I used to carry when I was a sergeant.  Apropos, as the French valets say, who cut their masters’ throats [23b]—apropos, a word about dresses.  You must, many of you, have seen what I have read a description of, Kemble and Mrs. Siddons in Macbeth, with more gold and silver plastered on their doublets than would have kept an honest family in butchers’ meat and flannel from year’s end to year’s end!  I am informed, (now mind, I do not vouch for the fact), but I am informed that all such extravagant idleness is to be done away with here.  Lady Macbeth is to have a plain quilted petticoat, a cotton gown, and a mob cap (as the court parasites call it;—it will be well for them if, one of these days, they don’t wear a mob cap—I mean a white cap, with a mob to look at them); and Macbeth is to appear in an honest yeoman’s drab coat, and a pair of black calamanco breeches.  Not Salamanca; no, nor Talavera neither, my most Noble Marquess; but plain, honest, black calamanco stuff breeches.  This is right; this is as it should be.  Most thinking people, I have heard you much abused.  There is not a compound in the language but is strung fifty in a rope, like onions, by the Morning Post, and hurled in your teeth.  You are called the mob; and when they have made you out to be the mob, you are called the scum of the people, and the dregs of the people.  I should like to know how you can be both.  Take a basin of broth—not cheap soup, Mr. Wilberforce—not soup for the poor, at a penny a quart, as your mixture of horses’ legs, brick-dust, and old shoes, was denominated—but plain, wholesome, patriotic beef or mutton broth; take this, examine it, and you will find—mind, I don’t vouch for the fact, but I am told—you will find the dregs at the bottom, and the scum at the top.  I will endeavour to explain this to you: England is a large earthenware pipkin; John Bull is the beef thrown into it; taxes are the hot water he boils in; rotten boroughs are the fuel that blazes under this same pipkin; parliament is the ladle that stirs the hodge-podge, and sometimes—.  But, hold!  I don’t wish to pay Mr. Newman [24a] a second visit.  I leave you better off than you have been this many a day: you have a good house over your head; you have beat the French in Spain; the harvest has turned out well; the comet keeps its distance; [24b] and red slippers are hawked about in Constantinople for next to nothing; and for all this, again and again I tell you, you are indebted to Mr. Whitbread!!!

VI.
THE LIVING LUSTRES.

By T. M. [25]

[THOMAS MOORE.]

[Mr. Moore died 26th February, 1852, in his 73rd year.]

“Jam te juvaverit
Viros relinquere,
Doctæque conjugis
Sinu quiescere.”

Sir T. More.

I.

O why should our dull retrospective addresses
   Fall damp as wet blankets on Drury Lane fire?
Away with blue devils, away with distresses,
   And give the gay spirit to sparkling desire!

II.

Let artists decide on the beauties of Drury,
   The richest to me is when woman is there;
The question of houses I leave to the jury;
   The fairest to me is the house of the fair.

III.

Bloom, Theatre, bloom, in the roseate blushes
   Of beauty illumed by a love-breathing smile!
And flourish, ye pillars, [26] as green as the rushes
   That pillow the nymphs of the Emerald Isle!

VIII.

VII.
THE REBUILDING.

By R. S. [28a]

[ROBERT SOUTHEY.]

[Mr. Southey died March 13, 1843, in his 69th year.]

—“Per audaces nova dithyrambos
Verba devolvit numerisque fertur
Lege solutis.”

Horat.

[Spoken by a Glendoveer.]

      I am a blessed Glendoveer: [28b]
   ’Tis mine to speak, and yours to hear.
      Midnight, [28c] yet not a nose
   From Tower-hill to Piccadilly snored!
      Midnight, yet not a nose
   From Indra drew the essence of repose!
      See with what crimson fury,
By Indra fann’d, the god of fire ascends the walls of Drury

      Tops of houses, blue with lead,
   Bend beneath the landlord’s tread.
Master and ’prentice, serving-man and lord,
         Nailor and tailor,
         Grazier and brazier,
   Through streets and alleys pour’d—
         All, all abroad to gaze,
      And wonder at the blaze.
   Thick calf, fat foot, and slim knee,
      Mounted on roof and chimney, [29a]
   The mighty roast, the mighty stew
               To see;
         As if the dismal view
   Were but to them a Brentford jubilee.
Vainly, all-radiant Surya, sire of Phæton
   (By Greeks call’d Apollo [29b]),
         Hollow
      Sounds from thy harp proceed;
         Combustible as reed,
The tongue of Vulcan licks thy wooden legs:
From Drury’s top, dissever’d from thy pegs,
         Thou tumblest,
            Humblest,
Where late thy bright effulgence shone on high;
   While, by thy somerset excited, fly
         Ten million
            Billion
   Sparks from the pit, to gem the sable sky.
Now come the men of fire to quench the fires:
   To Russell Street see Globe and Atlas run,
      Hope gallops first, and second Sun;
         On flying heel,
      See Hand-in-Hand
      O’ertake the band!
   View with what glowing wheel
         He nicks
         Phoenix!
While Albion scampers from Bridge Street, Blackfriars—
         Drury Lane!  Drury Lane!
         Drury Lane!  Drury Lane!
   They shout and they bellow again and again.
            All, all in vain!
         Water turns steam;
         Each blazing beam
   Hisses defiance to the eddying spout:
It seems but too plain that nothing can put it out!
      Drury Lane!  Drury Lane!
      See, Drury Lane expires!

Pent in by smoke-dried beams, twelve moons or more,
            Shorn of his ray,
         Surya in durance lay:
      The workmen heard him shout,
      But thought it would not pay
         To dig him out.
   When lo! terrific Yamen, lord of hell,
         Solemn as lead,
      Judge of the dead,
   Sworn foe to witticism,
   By men call’d criticism,
   Came passing by that way:
Rise! cried the fiend, behold a sight of gladness!
      Behold the rival theatre!
      I’ve set O. P. at her, [31]
            Who, like a bull-dog bold,
      Growls and fastens on his hold.
   The many-headed rabble roar in madness;
      Thy rival staggers: come and spy her
   Deep in the mud as thou art in the mire.
So saying, in his arms he caught the beaming one,
         And crossing Russell Street,
         He placed him on his feet
   ’Neath Covent Garden dome.  Sudden a sound,
      As of the bricklayers of Babel, rose:
Horns, rattles, drums, tin trumpets, sheets of copper,
Punches and slaps, thwacks of all sorts and sizes,
   From the knobb’d bludgeon to the taper switch, [32]
         Ran echoing round the walls; paper placards
Blotted the lamps, boots brown with mud the benches;
      A sea of heads roll’d roaring in the pit;
         On paper wings O. P.’s
      Reclin’d in lettered ease;
      While shout and scoff,
         Ya! ya! off! off!
Like thunderbolt on Surya’s ear-drum fell,
         And seemed to paint
   The savage oddities of Saint
         Bartholomew in hell.

      There lay the buried god, and Time
      Seemed to decree eternity of lime;
   But pity, like a dew-drop, gently prest
Almighty Veeshnoo’s [34] adamantine breast:
         He, the preserver, ardent still
         To do whate’er he says he will,
         From South-hill wing’d his way,
         To raise the drooping lord of day.
All earthly spells the busy one o’erpower’d;
         He treats with men of all conditions,
Poets and players, tradesmen and musicians;
            Nay, even ventures
            To attack the renters,
            Old and new:
            A list he gets
      Of claims and debts,
And deems nought done, while aught remains to do.

      Yamen beheld, and wither’d at the sight;
   Long had he aim’d the sunbeam to control,
         For light was hateful to his soul:
“Go on!” cried the hellish one, yellow with spite,
“Go on!” cried the hellish one, yellow with spleen,
   “Thy toils of the morning, like Ithaca’s queen,
         I’ll toil to undo every night.”

      Ye sons of song, rejoice!
   Veeshnoo has still’d the jarring elements,
      The spheres hymn music;
         Again the god of day
      Peeps forth with trembling ray,
Wakes, from their humid caves, the sleeping Nine,
      And pours at intervals a strain divine.
“I have an iron yet in the fire,” cried Yamen;
   “The vollied flame rides in my breath,
      My blast is elemental death;
This hand shall tear your paper bonds to pieces;
   Ingross your deeds, assignments, leases,
      My breath shall every line erase
      Soon as I blow the blaze.”

   Is it not written in the Himakoot book
   (That mighty Baly from Kehama took),
         “Who blows on pounce
         Must the Swerga renounce?”
      It is! it is!  Yamen, thine hour is nigh:
         Like as an eagle claws an asp,
   Veeshnoo has caught him in his mighty grasp,
And hurl’d him, in spite of his shrieks and his squalls,
   Whizzing aloft, like the Temple fountain,
   Three times as high as Meru mountain,
         Which is
   Ninety-nine times as high as St. Paul’s.

   Descending, he twisted like Levy the Jew, [36]
         Who a durable grave meant
         To dig in the pavement
            Of Monument-yard:
   To earth by the laws of attraction he flew,
         And he fell, and he fell
         To the regions of hell;
Nine centuries bounced he from cavern to rock,
And his head, as he tumbled, went nickety-nock,
      Like a pebble in Carisbrook well.

Now Veeshnoo turn’d round to a capering varlet,
   Array’d in blue and white and scarlet,
And cried, “Oh! brown of slipper as of hat!
      Lend me, Harlequin, thy bat!”
He seized the wooden sword, and smote the earth;
      When lo! upstarting into birth
      A fabric, gorgeous to behold,
      Outshone in elegance the old,
And Veeshnoo saw, and cried, “Hail, playhouse mine!”
      Then, bending his head, to Surya he said,
         “Soon as thy maiden sister Di
   Caps with her copper lid the dark blue sky,
   And through the fissures of her clouded fan
      Peeps at the naughty monster man.
         Go mount yon edifice,
   And show thy steady face
      In renovated pride,
   More bright, more glorious than before!”
      But ah! coy Surya still felt a twinge,
      Still smarted from his former singe;
         And to Veeshnoo replied,
         In a tone rather gruff,
   “No, thank you! one tumble’s enough!”

VIII.
DRURY’S DIRGE. [38a]

By LAURA MATILDA. [38b]

“You praise our sires; but though they wrote with force,
Their rhymes were vicious, and their diction coarse:
We want their strength, agreed; but we atone
For that, and more, by sweetness all our own.”—Gifford.

I.

Balmy Zephyrs, lightly flitting,
   Shade me with your azure wing;
On Parnassus’ summit sitting,
   Aid me, Clio, while I sing.

II.

Softly slept the dome of Drury
   O’er the empyreal crest,
When Alecto’s sister-fury
   Softly slumb’ring sunk to rest.

III.

VIII.

XIII.

IX.
A TALE OF DRURY LANE.

By W. S. [42]

[SIR WALTER SCOTT.]

[Sir Walter Scott died 21st September, 1832, in his 62nd year.]