Dr. Doran

“ Such was he who fairly frightened Hogarth himself, by assuming the face of the defunct Fielding!
Garrick's assertion, that a man must be a good comic actor to be a great tragedian, gave M. de Carmontelle the idea of a picture, in which he represented Garrick in an imposing tragic attitude, with a comic Garrick standing between the folding-doors, looking with surprise, and laughing at the other. While the ever-restless actor was sitting for this, he amused himself by passing through imperceptible gradations, from extreme joy to extreme sadness, and thence to terror and despair. ”

“ She was a just and spirited actress; a more perfectly good speaker than her more elegant, more fascinating contemporary. Mrs. Siddons has all the pathos of Mrs. Cibber, with [289] a thousand times more variety in its exertion, and she has the justness of Mrs. Pritchard, while only Garrick's countenance could vie with her's in those endless shades of meaning which almost make her charming voice superfluous, while the fine proportion and majesty of her form, and the beauty of her face, eclipse the remembrance of all her consummate predecessors. ”

“ When Dryden's Cleomenes, or Rowe's Jane Shore, used to complain of the hunger under which they suffered, it was the humour of the "gods" to fling bread down upon the stage by way of showing their sympathy, or their want of it.
"All the parts will be played to the best advantage, the whole of the company being now in town," was no unusual bait thrown out to win an audience. Sometimes the house would fill to see, on great occasions, the foremost folk in the land, fops and fine ladies occupying the amphitheatre erected on the stage, and the players acting between a double audience. ”

“ In the common theatre the guests are at home, where the politer forms of good breeding are not so nicely regarded. Every one there falls to, and likes or finds fault, according to his natural taste or appetite. At Court, where the Prince gives the treat and honours the table with his own presence, the audience is under the restraint of a circle where laughter or applause raised higher than a whisper would be stared at. At a public play they are both let loose, even till the actor is sometimes pleased with his not being able to be heard for the clamour of them. ”

“ This imitation is said to have injured Delane in the estimation of the town; but it was enjoyed by no one more than by tall and handsome Hale of Covent Garden, where his melodious voice was nightly used in the character of lover. But when Hale recognised himself in the soft, plaintive accents of a speech delivered without feeling, he was as disgusted as Giffard, who was so nettled by Garrick's close mimicry of his striking peculiarities that he is said to have challenged the mimic, fought with him, and wounded him in the sword-arm. ”

“ Wilks, now the great favourite of the town, justified all Betterton's prognostications. Like Betterton, he was to the end convinced that he might become more perfect by study and perseverance. Taking the extant score of judgments recorded of him, I find that Wilks was careful, judicious, painstaking in the smallest trifles; in comedy always brilliant, in tragedy always graceful and natural. For zeal, Cibber had not known his equal for half a century; careful himself, he allowed no one else to be negligent ”

“ Delaney may well expatiate on the delight of seeing Garrick, Barry, and Sheridan together in one piece. Such a triad as those three were, when young, in the very brightest of their powers, and achieving triumphs which made their hearts beat to accomplish something higher still, perhaps, never rendered a stage illustrious. ”

“ The critics were not more tender to a new play, particularly when provoked by sarcasms against their judgment in the prologue, than the above offender was to a well-conducted actress. "They come to a new play," Cibber tells us, "like hounds to a carcase, and are all in a full cry, sometimes for an hour together, before the curtain rises to throw it amongst them. Sure, those gentlemen cannot but allow that a play, condemned after a fair hearing, falls with thrice the ignominy, as when it is refused that common justice." ”

“ At this sinking of men below our level, the Archbishop of Dublin has glanced, when he says: "For one who is corrupted by becoming as bad as a bad example, there are ten that are debased by becoming content with being better."
If there was little honesty in Foote's method of dealing with human weaknesses, so was there small courage in the spirit of the satirist. He could annoy Garrick by saying that his puppets would not be so large as life, "not larger in fact than Mr. Garrick," and could mimic him as refusing to engage Punch and his wife,—Mr. and Mrs. Barry,—for he could do so with impunity. ”

“ When we see anything divert an audience, either in tragedy or comedy, that strikes at the duties of civil life, or exposes what the best men in all ages have looked upon as sacred and inviolable, it is the certain sign of a profligate race of men, who are fallen from the virtue of their forefathers, and will be contemptible in the eyes of their posterity. ”

“ I can fancy it disturbed Garrick's performance of Tancred on that night; the Rambler was universally read, and the application could not fail. But it disturbed nothing else. Years later, when Johnson visited Garrick at his Hampton villa, the spirit of Asper was softened in his breast, and he was justified in the well-known remark he made, as he contemplated the beauty and grandeur around him:—"These are the things, Davy, that make death terrible!" ”

“ Barry was otherwise remarkable, she had "a modest gaiety in her manners and address;" and though in Belvidera, Lady Randolph, Rutland, Euphrasia, Monimia, and Desdemona, she defied rivalry, she really preferred to act Lady Townley, Beatrice, the Widow Brady, Rosalind, and Biddy Tipkin. She acted tragedy, to gratify the house; comedy, to please herself; and she had a supreme indifference for the patronage of Ladies of Quality if she could only win the plaudits of the public at large. ”

“ As great a favourite as you are at present with the audience, you would be much more so were they acquainted with your private character, could they see you laying out great part of the profits which arise to you from entertaining them so well, in the support of an aged father; did they see you, who can charm them on the stage with personating the foolish and vicious characters of your sex, acting in real life the part of the best wife, the best daughter, the best sister, and the best friend. ”

“ The charming Lecouvreur, that Oldfield of the French stage, whose beauty and intellect were the double charm which rendered theatrical France ecstatic, was hurriedly interred within a saw-pit. Bishops might be exceedingly interested in, and unepiscopally generous to, living actresses of wit and beauty, but the prelates smote them with a "Maranatha!" and an "Avaunt ye!" when dead. Even Bossuet would attend the theatre to learn grace and elocution from them and their brethren: but when he had profited by the instruction, he denounced them all as "children of the devil!" ”

“ But the soul of Thalia is under her bodice, into a neater than which, Anadyomene could not have laced herself. She is rapt in the reading, and with book held out, and face upraised, and figure displayed at its very best, she enthrals her audience, unconscious herself that this is more numerous than she might have supposed. On the threshold of the open door stand a couple of guests; one of them has, to us, no name; the other is a gay, rollicking young fellow, smartly dressed, a semi-military look about him, good humour rippling over his face, combined with an air of astonishment and delight. ”

“ When Barry assumed the management of the Dublin Theatre, he found Mrs. Dancer a most promising actress, and her lord the most jealous husband in Ireland. Youth, beauty, genius, were the endowments she had brought to that husband; and he, on his death, left her in full possession of all she had brought with her, and nothing more. But these and a liberal salary were charms that attracted many admirers. An Irish earl was not ashamed, indeed, to woo the young, fair, and accomplished creature, with too free a gallantry ”

“ Kind-hearted people have remarked that Garrick never said so much to, or of, Quin when he was alive. Perhaps not. He struggled with Quin for mastery—vanquished him; became his friend, and hung up over his grave a glowing testimony to his talent and his virtues. This was in the spirit of old chivalry. What would kind-hearted people have? Was it not well in Garrick to speak truthfully of one dead whom, when living, he thus with pleasant satire described as soliloquising at the tomb of Duke Humphrey at St. Albans—
"A plague on Egypt's art, I say! ”

“ In the Irish silversmith's accomplished son, born in 1719, there was very good blood, with some of the disadvantages attached to that possession. Of fine personal appearance and bearing, an aristocratic expression, and a voice that might win a bird from the nest, Spranger Barry had expensive and too magnificent tastes. He was a gentleman; but he lived as though he were the lord of countless thousands, and with an income on which an earl might have existed becomingly, with moderate prudence, Spranger Barry died poor. ”

“ It has been said that the satire of Aristophanes killed Socrates. It really did so no more than that of Foote killed Whitfield. In this one respect the two men are alike.
Such exhibition of character as Foote made was described by Johnson, as a vice; and he, like Churchill, denied the actor's powers. The former maintained that Foote was never like the person he assumed to be, but only unlike Foote; and that he failed altogether, except with marked characteristics. He was as a painter who can portray a wen; and if a man hopped on one leg, Foote could do that to the life. ”

“ Sigismunda, Arpasia, in Johnson's "Irene," Zaphira, in "Barbarossa," and Cœlia, in Whitehead's comedy, the "School for Lovers." In these, as in all she played, I collect from various sources, that Mrs. Cibber was distinguished for unadorned simplicity, artless sensibility, harmony of voice, now sweetly plaintive, now grandly powerful, and eyes that in tender grief seemed to swim in tears; in rage, to flash with fire; in despair, to become as dead. Her beauty did not so much consist in regularity of feature as in variety and power of expression ”

“ Rich thought himself so much a better actor than mimic, that he was ten times happier when giving foolish instruction to a novice training for Hamlet, than when he was marshalling his corps of pantomimists, and admirably teaching them to say everything, and yet be silent. ”