Two hours after Betsy and her father re-appeared in the schoolroom. Ma'amselle," said he, bawling as loud as he could, with the view, as we afterward conjectured, of making her understand him. Ma'amselle, I've no great love for the French, whom I take to be our natural enemies. But you're a good young woman; you've been kind to my Betsy, and have taught her how to make your fallals; and moreover you're a good daughter and so's my Betsy. She says that she thinks you're fretting, because you can't manage to take your grandfather and grandmother back to France again;-so as you let her help you in that other handy-work, why you must let her help you in this." Then throwing a heavy purse into her lap, catching his little daughter up in his arms, and hugging her to the honest breast where she hid her tears and her blushes, he departed, leaving poor Mdlle. Rose too much bewildered to speak or to comprehend the happiness that had fallen upon her, and the whole school the better for the lesson.

XXI.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF DRAMATIC AUTHORS.

COLLEY CIBBER.-RICHARD CUMBERLAND.

Of all literary fascinations there is none like that of the Drama, written or acted. None that begins so early, or that lasts so long.

With regard to actors, it is a sort of possession by evil spirits. Boys and girls from the school-room and the counting-house, the shop-board, or the college, rush upon the stage, forsaking home and comfort, and the thousand realities of life, in chase of the phantom, Fame. And in authorship, the passion, although not perhaps so common, is hardly less engrossing, or less destructive The "Honeymoon," one of the most delightful of modern comedies, was the seventh play presented by poor Tobin to different managers. He died, I believe, the very same night that it was performed with unrivaled success, certainly before the intelligence of its triumph could reach him. Gerald Griffin was even less fortunate. "Gisippus" was rejected on all hands, and only produced after his death, and after the destruction of his other tragedies, to secure for its author a posthumous reputation. Many, no doubt, more unfortunate still, have died and left no name; and many may still exist, dragging after them a weary weight of hope deferred, and genius unrecognized.

I have some right to talk of the love of the drama, the passionate, absorbing, worshiping love, since it took possession of me at the earliest age, and clung to me long. Nay, I am not even now absolutely sure, that if the Cruvellis and the Viordots would but say, instead of sing; if we might but see in tragedy the dramatic power lavished upon opera, I might not be simple enough once more to take up my old enthusiasm, and haunt the theaters at sixty-five! Luckily, the age is a musical age, and there is small danger that any Queen of Song should exchange her notes fer

words, especially in a country where the notes of a prima donna are synonymous with bank-notes.

The first play I remember to have seen was in a barntragedy of course-the tragedy dear to heroes of the buskin, and no less dear to their youthful auditors, "Richard the Third." Ah! I should have asked nothing better than to see Richard murdered in that barn every night! Then came other play-goings more legitimate; and readings of Shakspeare by bits, and here and there, I scarcely know how or when. For it may be reckoned among the best and dearest of our English privileges, that we are all more or less educated in Shakspeare; that the words and thoughts of the greatest of poets are, as it were, engrafted into our minds, and must, to a certain extent, enrich and fructify the most barren stock. Shakspeare came to me I can not tell how. But my first great fit of dramatic reading was, I am ashamed to say, of very questionable origin; a stolen pleasure; and therefore-alas! for our poor sinful human nature!—therefore by very far more dear.

This is the story.

My childhood was, as I have elsewhere said, a very happy one; scarcely less happy in the great London school where I passed the five years between ten years old and fifteen, than at home: to tell the truth, I was well nigh as much spoilt in one place as in the other; but as I was a quiet and orderly little girl, and fell easily into the rules of the house, there was no great harm done, either to me or to the school discipline.

One exception, however, did exist, both to my felicity and to my obedience, and that one might be comprised in the single word-Music.

How my father, who certainly never knew the tune of "God save the King" from that of the other national air "Rule Britannia," came to take into his head so strong a fancy to make me an accomplished musician, I could never rightly understand, but that such a fancy did possess him I found to my sorrow! From the day I was five years old, he stuck me up to the piano, and although teacher after teacher had discovered that I had neither ear, nor taste, nor application, he continued fully bent upon my learning it. By the time my London education commenced, it had assumed the form of a fixed idea.

The regular master employed in the school was Mr. Hook

(father of Theodore), then a popular composer of Vauxhall songs, and an instructor of average ability. A large smooth-faced man he was, good-natured, and civil spoken; but failing, as in my case every body else had failed, to produce the slightest improvement, my father, not much struck by his appearance or manner, decided, as usual, that the fault lay with the teacher; and happening one day to fall in with a very clever little German professor, who was giving lessons to two of my school-fellows, he at once took me from the tuition of Mr. Hook, and placed me under that of Herr Schuberl, who, an impatient, irritable man of genius, very speedily avenged the cause of his rival music-master, by dismissing in her turn the unlucky pupil.

Things being in this unpromising state, I began to entertain. some hope that my musical education would be given up altogether. In this expectation I did injustice to my father's pertinacity. This time he threw the blame upon the instrument; and because I could make nothing after eight years' thumping upon the piano-forte, resolved that I should become a great perforiner upon the harp.

It so happened that our school-house (the same, by the way, in which poor Miss Landon passed the greater part of her life), forming one angle of an irregular octagon place, was so built that the principal reception-room was connected with the entrance-hall by a long passage and two double doors. This room, fitted up with nicely bound books, contained, among other musical instruments, the harp, upon which I was sent to practice every morning; sent alone, most comfortably out of sight and hearing of every individual in the house, the only means of approach being through two resounding green baize doors, swinging to with a heavy bang, the moment they were let go; so that as the change from piano to harp, and from the impulsive Herr Schuber to the prim, demure little Miss Essex, my new musicmistress, had by no means worked the miracle of producing in me any love of that detestable art, I very shortly betook myself to the book-shelves, and seeing a row of octavo volumes lettered "Théâtre de Voltaire," I selected one of them, and had deposited it in front of the music-stand, and perched myself upon the stool to read it in less time than an ordinary pupil would have consumed in getting through the first three bars of " Ar Hyd y Nos."

"Zaïre." "Zaïre" is not

The play upon which I opened was 'Richard the Third," any more than M. de Voltaire is Shak- . speare; nevertheless, the play has its merits. There is a certain romance in the situation; an interest in the story; a mixture of Christian piety and Oriental fervor, which strikes the imagination. So I got through "Zaïre ;" and when I had finished "Zaïre," I proceeded to other plays-" Edipe," "Merope," " Alzire," " Mahomet," plays well worth reading, but not so absorbing as to prevent my giving due attention to the warning doors, and putting the book in its place, and striking the chords of " Ar Hyd y Nos," as often as I heard a step approaching; or gathering up myself and my music, and walking quietly back to the schoolroom as soon as the hour for practice had expired.

But when the dramas of Voltaire were exhausted, and I had recourse to some neighboring volumes, the state of matters changed at once. The new volumes contained the comedies of Molière, and, once plunged into the gay realities of his delightful world, all the miseries of this globe of ours-harp, music-books, practicings, and lessons-were forgotten; Miss Essex melted into thin air, "Ar Hyd y Nos" became a nonentity. I never recollected that there was such a thing as time; I never heard the warning doors; the only tribulations that troubled me were the tribulations of "Sganarelle;" the only lessons I thought about the lessons of the "Bourgeois Gentilhomme." So I was caught; caught in the very fact of laughing till I cried, over the apostrophes of the angry father to the galley in which he is told his son has been taken captive. "Que diable alloit-il faire dans cette galère!" The apostrophe comes true with regard to somebody in a scrape during every moment of every day, and was never more applicable than to myself at that instant.

Luckily, however, the person who discovered my delinquency was one of my chief spoilers, the husband of our good schoolmistress, himself a Frenchman, an adorer of the great dramatist of France, and no worshiper of music. He was also a very clever man, with a strong and just conviction that no proficiency in any art could be gained without natural qualifications and sincere good-will. Accordingly, when he could speak for laughing, what he said sounded far more like a compliment upon my relish for the comic drama, than a rebuke. I suppose that he spoke to the same effect to my father. At all events, the issue of the affair