“ Deviation from scenic propriety has only to vituperate itself for the consequences it generates. Let the actor consider the line of exit as that line beyond which he should not soar in quest of spurious applause: let him reflect, that in proportion as he advances to the lamps, he recedes from nature; that the truncheon of Hotspur acquires no additional charm from encountering the cheek of beauty in the stage-box, and that the bravura of Mandane may produce effect, although the throat of her who warbles it should not overhang the orchestra. ”

“ SECRETARY OF THE MANAGING COMMITTEE
OF DRURY-LANE PLAYHOUSE.
Sir,
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 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. ”

“ Spread, viewless giant, all thy arms of mist
Like windmill-sails to bring the poet grist;
As erst thy roaring son, with eddying gale,
Whirl'd Orithyia from her native vale—
So, while Lucretian wonders I rehearse,
Augusta's sons shall patronise my verse.
I sing of Atoms, whose creative brain,
With eddying impulse, built new Drury Lane;
Not to the labours of subservient man,
To no young Wyatt appertains the plan—
We mortals stalk, like horses in a mill,
Impassive media of atomic will;
Ye stare! then Truth's broad talisman discern—
'Tis Demonstration speaks—attend, and learn! ”

“ Zuleikah! The young Agas in the bazaar are slim-waisted and wear yellow slippers. I am old and hideous. One of my eyes is out, and the hairs of my beard are mostly grey. Praise be to Allah! I am a merry bard.
There is a bird upon the terrace of the Emir's chief wife. Praise be to Allah! He has emeralds on his neck, and a ruby tail. I am a merry bard. He deafens me with his diabolical screaming.
There is a little brown bird in the basket-maker's cage. Praise be to Allah! He ravishes my soul in the moonlight. I am a merry bard.
The peacock is an Aga, but the little bird is a Bulbul. ”

“ O why should our dull retrospective addresses [20]
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.
When woman's soft smile all our senses bewilders,
And gilds, while it carves, her dear form on the heart,
What need has New Drury of carvers and gilders?
With Nature so bounteous, why call upon Art? ”

“ Sleep on, fair maiden of Borrowdale!
Sleep! O sleep! and do not wake!
Dream of the dance, till the foot so pale,
And the beauteous ancle shiver and shake;
Till thou shalt press, with feeling bland,
Thine own fair breast for lover's hand.
Thy heart is light as summer breeze,
Thy heart is joyous as the day;
Man never form of angel sees,
But thou art fair as they!
So lovers ween, and so they say,
So thine shall ween for many a day!
The hour's at hand, O woe is me!
For they are coming, and they are three! THE CURSE OF THE LAUREATE. (SOUTHEY) Carmen Judiciale. ”

“ So amorously, my dove;
'Tis something quite apart from
The gentle cares of love.
I feel a bitter craving—
A dark and deep desire,
That glows beneath my bosom
Like coals of kindled fire.
The passion of the nightingale,
When singing to the rose,
Is feebler than the agony
That murders my repose!
Nay, dearest! do not doubt me,
Though madly thus I speak—
I feel thy arms about me,
Thy tresses on my cheek:
I know the sweet devotion
That links thy heart with mine,—
I know my soul's emotion
Is doubly felt by thine ”

“ To embody the flying colours of folly, to arrest evanescence, to give to bubbles the globular consistency as well as form, to exhibit on the stage the piebald denizen of the stable, and the half-reasoning parent of combs, to display the brisk locomotion of Columbine, or the tortuous attitudinizing of Punch;—these are the occupations of others, whose ambition, limited to the applause of unintellectual fatuity, is too innocuous for the application of satire, and too humble for the incitement of jealousy. ”

“ Shall I not then the cruel Fair condemn
Who on that dart IMPALES my BOSOM'S GEM? Sonnet II.
To a Painter attempting Delia's Portrait.
Rash Painter! canst thou give the ORB OF DAY
In all its noontide glory? or portray
The DIAMOND, that athwart the taper'd hall
Flings the rich flashes of its dazzling light?
Even if thine art could boast such magic might,
Yet if it strove to paint my Angel's EYE,
Here it perforce must fail. Cease! lest I call
Heaven's vengeance on thy sin: Must thou be told
The CRIME it is to paint DIVINITY? ”

“ The brother looks up; he catches her eye, he fearful, apologetic; she smiles back at him, not reproachfully smiling, with loving pretence of hope smiling —it is too much for him; he buries his face in the folds of the mother's black gown.
7. The best room of the house, on the Sabbath only open'd; the smell of horse-hair furniture and mahogany varnish; the ornaments on the whatnot in the corner; the wax-fruit, dusty, sunken, sagged in, consumptive-looking, under a glass globe; the sealing-wax imitation of coral; the cigar boxes with shells plastered over; the perforated card-board motto. ”

“ 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 playhouse 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. ”

“ CHARLES STUART CALVERLEY. ODE TO TOBACCO. (LONGFELLOW)
Thou who, when fears attack,
Bid'st them avaunt, and Black
Care, at the horseman's back
Perching, unseatest;
Sweet when the morn is grey;
Sweet, when they've cleared away
Lunch; and at close of day
Possibly sweetest:
I have a liking old
For thee, though manifold
Stories, I know, are told,
Not to thy credit;
How one (or two at most)
Drops make a cat a ghost—
Useless, except to roast—
Doctors have said it:
How they who use fusees
All grow by slow degrees
Brainless as chimpanzees,
Meagre as lizards;
Go mad, and beat their wives ”

“ The Cherub listens from his starry throne,
And motionless are stopt the attentive SPHERES,
To hear more heavenly music than their own.
Cease, Delia, cease! for all the ANGEL THRONG,
Hearkening to thee, let sleep their golden wires!
Cease, Delia, cease, that too surpassing song,
Lest, stung to envy, they should break their lyres.
Cease, ere my senses are to madness driven
By the strong joy! Cease, Delia, lest my soul,
Enrapt, already THINK ITSELF IN HEAVEN,
And burst the feeble Body's frail control.
[148]
Elegy III.
The Poet Expatiates on the Beauty of Delia's Hair. ”

“ In the colours shaded off thee, the suggestions of a soul.
'Yea,' the poet said, 'I smell thee by some passive divination,
I am satisfied with insight of the measure of thine house;
What had happened I conjecture, in a blank and rhythmic passion,
Had the æons thought of making thee a man, and me a louse.
'The broad lives of upper planets, their absorption and digestion,
Food and famine, health and sickness, I can scrutinize and test;
Through a shiver of the senses comes a resonance of question,
And by proof of balanced answer I decide that I am best. ”

“ IN MEMORIAM TECHNICAM. (TENNYSON)
I count it true which sages teach—
That passion sways not with repose,
That love, confounding these with those,
Is ever welding each with each.
And so when time has ebbed away,
Like childish wreaths too lightly held,
The song of immemorial eld
Shall moan about the belted bay,
Where slant Orion slopes his star
To swelter in the rolling seas,
Till slowly widening by degrees,
The grey climbs upward from afar,
And golden youth and passion stray
Along the ridges of the strand—
Not far apart, but hand in hand—
With all the darkness danced away! ”

“ In Phelim's brogues, which bares his naked skin,
Like traitor gap in warlike fort, I deem,
That falsely lets the fierce besieger in,
Nor seeks the pedagogue by other course to win. XVI.
No parent dear he hath to heed his cries;—
Alas! his parent dear is far aloof,
And deep in Seven-Dial cellar lies,
Killed by kind cudgel-play, or gin of proof;
Or climbeth, catwise, on some London roof,
Singing, perchance, a lay of Erin's Isle,
Or, whilst he labours, weaves a fancy-woof,
Dreaming he sees his home,—his Phelim smile;
Ah me! that luckless imp, who weepeth all the while! XVII.
Ah! ”

“ Amid the general hum of gratulation which flatters us in front, it is fit that some regard should be paid to the murmurs of despondence that assail us in the rear. They, as I have elsewhere expressed it, 'who live to please,' should not have their own pleasures entirely overlooked. The children of Thespis are general in their censures of the architect, in having placed the locality of exit at such a distance from the oily irradiators which now dazzle the eyes of him who addresses you. I am, cries the Queen of Terrors, robbed of my fair proportions. ”

“ 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. X.
So fares the follower in the Muses' train;
He toils to starve, and only lives in death;
We slight him, till our patronage is vain,
Then round his skeleton a garland wreathe,
And o'er his bones an empty requiem breathe—
Oh! with what tragic horror would he start,
(Could he be conjured from the grave beneath)
To find the stage again a Thespian cart,
And elephants and colts down-trampling Shakespeare's art. XI.
Hence, pedant Nature! ”

“ Unto the bust of Alfred Tennyson,
By Woolner carved, subscribed for by the youth
Who loved the Poet, hoped to see him set
Within the Library of Trinity,
One great man more o' the house, among the great,
Who grace that still Valhalla, ranged in row,
Along the chequered marbles of the floor,
Two stately ranks—to where the fragrant limes
Look thro' the far end window, cool and green.
A band it is, of high companionship,—
Chief, Newton, and the broad-browed Verulam,
And others only less than these in arts
Or science: names that England holds on high. ”

“ You she by forces past your own control
Made a cheese-stealer? Be it so: of me
By forces as resistless and her own [350]
She made a mouse-killer. Thus, either plays
A rôle in no wise chosen of himself,
But takes what part the great Stage Manager
Cast him for, when, the play was set afoot.
Remains we act ours—without private spite,
But still with spirit and fidelity,
As fits good actors: you I blame no whit
For nibbling cheese—simply I throw you down
Unblamed—nay, even morally assoiled,
To pussy there: blame thou not me for that. ”

“ To make Johnson call a door "a ligneous barricado," and its knocker and bell its "frappant and tintinnabulant appendages," is neither just nor humorous; and we are surprised that a writer who has given such extraordinary proofs of his talent for finer ridicule and fairer imitation, should have stooped to a vein of pleasantry so low, and so long ago exhausted; especially as, in other passages of the same piece, he has shewn how well qualified he was both to catch and to render the true characteristics of his original. ”

“ Surely no spirit or sense of a soul that was soft to the spirit and soul of our senses
Sweetens the stress of suspiring suspicion that sobs in the semblance and sound of a sigh;
Only this oracle opens Olympian, in mystical moods and triangular tenses—
'Life is the lust of a lamp for the light that is dark till the dawn of the day when we die.'
Mild is the mirk and monotonous music of memory, melodiously mute as it may be,
While the hope in the heart of a hero is bruised by the breach of men's rapiers, resigned to the rod ”

“ Wherefore doth Propriety dress her with the fair foliage of artifice:
And when she is drest, behold! she knoweth not herself again.—
I walked in the Forest; and above me stood the yew, [299]
Stood like a slumbering giants shrouded in impenetrable shade;
Then I pass'd into the citizen's garden, and marked a tree clipt into shape,
(The giant's locks had been shorn by the Dalilah-shears of Decorum;)
And I said, 'Surely nature is goodly; but how much goodlier is Art!'
I heard the wild notes of the lark floating far over the blue sky,
And my foolish heart went after him, and, lo! ”

“ To tempt us in theatre, senate, or college—
I mean the love-apples that bloom in the eyes. VI.
There too is the lash which, all statutes controlling,
Still governs the slaves that are made by the fair;
For man is the pupil, who, while her eye's rolling,
Is lifted to rapture, or sunk in despair. ”

“ The wife waiting for the husband—he is at the tavern, jovial, carousing; she, alone in the kitchen sprinkling clothes—the little red wood clock with peaked top, with pendulum wagging behind a pane of gaily painted glass, strikes twelve. [373]
The sound of the husband's voice on the still night air—he is singing: We won't go home till morning! —the wife arising, toward the wood-shed hastily going, stealthily entering, the voice all the time coming nearer, inebriate, chantant. ”

“ The stage-door is the only gate of freedom in the whole edifice, and through that I made my way from Bagshaw's [14] 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 Brobdingnag filigree; but into a plain, honest, homely, industrious, wholesome, brown brick playhouse. ”

“ Many of the public prints have censured the taste of the Committee, in thus contracting for 'Addresses,' as they would for nails—by the gross; but it is surprising that none should have censured their temerity. One hundred and eleven of the 'Addresses' must, of course, be unsuccessful: to each of the authors, thus infallibly classed with the genus irritabile, it would be very hard to deny six staunch friends, who consider his the best of all possible 'Addresses,' and whose tongues will be as ready to laud him, as to hiss his adversary. ”