PORTRAITS FROM THE ROSCIAD.
public stage; and, prominent among them, the Scotch
To mischief train'd, e'en from his mother's womb,
Grown old in fraud, tho' yet in manhood's bloom,
Adopting arts by which gay villains rise,
And reach the heights which honest men despise ;
Mute at the bar, and in the senate loud,
Dull 'mongst the dullest, proudest of the proud;
A pert, prim, Prater of the northern race,
Guilt in his heart, and famine in his face,
Stood forth and thrice he waved his lily hand-
And thrice he twirl'd his tye—thrice strok'd his band.
But these, masterly as they might be, were only "limbs and flourishes," for of course the substance of the satire was its picture of the Stage. And how finished was the portraiture, how vivid its reflection of the originals, how faithful the mirror it set up, in which the vainest, most sensitive, and most irritable of mankind, might see themselves for nothing better than they were, will appear in even the few incomplete subjects we here borrow from its gallery.
In characters of low and vulgar mould,
Where nature's coarsest features we behold,
Where, destitute of ev'ry decent grace,
Unmanner'd jests are blurted in your face,
There Yates with justice strict attention draws,
Acts truly from himself, and gains applause.
But when, to please himself or charm his wife,
He aims at something in politer life,
When, blindly thwarting Nature's stubborn plan,
He treads the stage by way of gentleman,
The Clown, who no one touch of breeding knows.
Looks like Tom Errand dress'd in Clincher's clothes.
Fond of his dress, fond of his person grown,
Laugh'd at by all, and to himself unknown,
From side to side he struts, he smiles, he prates,
And seems to wonder what's become of Yates.
SPARKS, SMITH, AND ROSS.
Sparks at his glass sat comfortably down.
To separate frown from smile, and smile from frown ; Smith, the genteel, the airy, and the smart,
Smith was just gone to school to say his part;
Ross (a misfortune which we often meet)
Was fast asleep at dear Statira's feet;
Statira, with her hero to agree,
Stood on her feet as fast asleep as he.
Mossop, attach'd to military plan,
Still kept his eye fix'd on his right-hand man.
Whilst the mouth measures words with seeming skill,
The right-hand labours, and the left lies still;
For he resolved on scripture-grounds to go,
What the right doth, the left-hand shall not know.
With studied impropriety of speech
He soars beyond the hackney critic's reach;
To epithets allots emphatic state,
Whilst principals, ungrac'd, like lackies, wit;
PORTRAITS FROM THE ROSCIAD.
In ways first trodden by himself excels,
And stands alone in indeclinables;
Conjunction, preposition, adverb, join
To stamp new vigour on the nervous line;
In monosyllables his thunders roll,
HE, SHE, IT, AND, WE, YE, THEY, fright the soul.
In person taller than the common size,
Behold where Barry draws admiring eyes!
When lab'ring passions, in his bosom pent,
Convulsive rage, and struggling heave for vent,
Spectators, with imagin'd terrors warm,
Anxious expect the bursting of the storm:
But, all unfit in such a pile to dwell,
His voice comes forth, like Echo from her cell;
To swell the tempest needful aid denies,
And all adown the stage in feeble murmurs dies.
What man, like Barry, with such pains, can err
In elocution, action, character?
What man could give, if Barry was not here,
Such well applauded tenderness to Lear?
Who else can speak so very, very fine,
That sense may kindly end with ev'ry line?
Some dozen lines before the ghost is there,
Behold him for the solemn scene prepare.
See how he frames his eyes, poises each limb,
Puts the whole body into proper trim.
From whence we learn, with no great stretch of art,
Five lines hence comes a ghost, and, Ha! a start.
When he appears most perfect, still we find
Something which jars upon, and hurts the mind;
Whatever lights upon a part are thrown
We see too plainly they are not his own.
No flame from Nature ever yet he caught;
Nor knew a feeling which he was not taught;
He raised his trophies on the base of art,
And conn'd his passions, as he conn'd his part.
His words bore sterling weight; nervous and strong,
In manly tides of sense they roll'd along.
Happy in art, he chiefly had pretence
To keep up numbers, yet not forfeit sense.
No actor ever greater heights could reach
In all the labour'd artifice of speech......
His eyes, in gloomy socket taught to roll,
Proclaim'd the sullen habit of his soul.
Heavy and phlegmatic he trod the stage,
Too proud for tenderness, too dull for rage.
When Hector's lovely widow shines in tears
Or Rowe's gay rake dependent virtue jeers,
With the same cast of features he is seen
To chide the libertine, and court the queen.
From the tame scene, which without passion flows,
With just desert his reputation rose;
Nor less he pleased, when, on some surly plan,
He was, at once, the actor and the man.
Here Havard, all serene, in the same strains
Loves, hates, and rages, triumphs, and complains;
His easy vacant face proclaim'd a heart
Which could not feel emotions, nor impart.
With him came mighty Davies. On my life
That Davies hath a very pretty wife!
Statesman all over!-In plots famous grown!-
He mouths a sentence, as curs mouth a bone.
PORTRAITS FROM THE ROSCIAD.
Last Garrick came.-Behind him throng a train
Of snarling critics, ignorant as vain.
One finds out," He's of stature somewhat low,
Your hero always should be tall you know.
True natural greatness all consists in height.”
Produce your voucher, Critic.-" Sergeant Kite."
Another can't forgive the paltry arts,
By which he makes his way to shallow hearts;
Mere pieces of finesse, traps for applause-
"Avaunt! unnatural Start, affected Pause."
For me, by Nature form'd to judge with phlegm,
I can't acquit by wholesale, nor condemn.
The best things carried to excess are wrong:
The start may be too frequent, pause too long;
But, only us'd in proper time and place,
Severest judgment must allow them grace.
If bunglers, form'd on Imitation's plan,
Just in the way that monkies mimic man,
Their copied scene with mangled arts disgrace,
And pause and start with the same vacant face,
We join the critic laugh; those tricks we scorn
Which spoil the scenes they mean them to adorn.
But when, from Nature's pure and genuine source,
These strokes of acting flow with generous force,
When in the features all the soul's portray'd,
And passions, such as Garrick's, are display'd,
To me they seem from quickest feelings caught:
Each start is Nature, and each pause is Thought.
The judges, as the sev'ral parties came,
With temper heard, with judgment weigh'd each claim
And, in their sentence happily agreed,
In name of both, Great Shakespeare thus decreed.
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