PLAY-WRIGHTING. To the Editor. Sir, The following short matter-of-fact narrative, if inserted in your widely circulated miscellany, may in some degree tend to lessen the number of dramatic aspirants, and afford a little amusement to your readers. I was, at the age of sixteen, apprenticed to a surgeon, and had served but two years of my apprenticeship, when I began to conceive that I had talents for something superior to the profession I had embraced. I imagined that literature was my forte; and accordingly I tried my skill in the composition of a tale, wherein I was so far successful, as to obtain its insertion in a "periodical" of the day. This was succeeded by others; some of which were rejected, and some inserted. In a short time, however, I perceived that I had gained but little fame, and certainly no profit. I therefore determined to attempt dramatic writing, by which I imagined that I should acquire both fame and fortune. Accordingly, after much trouble, I concocted a plot, and in three months completed a farce! I submitted it to my friends, all of whom declared it to be "an excellent thing;" and that if merit met with its due reward, my piece would certainly be brought out. Flattered and encouraged by their good opinion, I offered it, with confidence of success, to the proprietors of Drury-lane theatre. In the space of a week, however, my piece was returned, with a polite note, informing me, that it was "not in any way calculated for representation at that theatre." I concluded that it could not have been read; and having consoled myself with that idea, I transmitted it to the rival theatre. One morning, after the lapse of a few days, my hopes were clouded by a neat parcel, which I found to contain my manuscript, with the same polite but cutting refusal, added to which was an assurance," that it had been read most attentively." I inwardly execrated the Covent Garden "reader" for a fool, and determined to persevere. At the suggestion of my friends I made numerous alterations, and submitted my farce to the manager of the Haymarket theatre, relying upon his liberality; but, after the usual delay of a week, it was again returned. At the Lyceum it also met with a similar fate. I was much hurt by these rejections, yet determined to persevere. The minor theatres remained for me, and I applied to the manager of one of these establishments, who, in the course of time, assured me, that my piece should certainly be produced. I was delighted at the brilliant prospects which seemed to open to me, and I fancied that I was fast approaching the summit of my ambition. Three tedious months ensued before I was summoned to attend the rehearsal; but I was then much pleased at the pains the actors appeared to have taken in acquiring their parts. The wished-for night arrived. I never dreamed of failure; and I invited a few of my select friends to witness its first representationit was the last: for, notwithstanding the exertions of the performers, and the applause of my worthy friends, so unanimous was the hostility of the audience, that my piece was damned!-damned, too, at a minor theatre! I attributed its failure entirely to the depraved taste of the audience. I was disgusted; and resolved, from that time, never more to waste my talents in endeavouring to amuse an unappreciating and ungrateful public. I have been firm to that resolution. I relinquished the making up of plays for the more profitable occupation of making up prescriptions, and am now living in comfort upon the produce of my profession. EPIGRAM. AUCTOR. It A few years ago a sign of one of the Durham inns was removed, and sent to Chester-le-Street, by way of a frolic. was generally supposed that the feat was achieved by some of the legal students then in that city; and a respectable attorney there was so fully persuaded of it, that he immediately began to make inquiries corroborative of his suspicions. The circumstances drew forth the following epigram from our friend T. Q. M., which has never appeared in print. From one of our inns was a sign taken down, And breathing revenge on the frolicsome sparks, clerks." 'gentlemen From the prophets methinks we may inference draw, A favourite expression of the legal gentleman alluded to. PERSONAL CHARMS DISCLAIMED, BY A LADY. If any human being was free from personal vanity it must have been the second duchess d'Orleans, Charlotte Elizabeth of Bavaria. In one of her letters, (dated 9th August, 1718,) she says, "I must certainly be monstrously ugly. I never had a good feature. My eyes are small, my nose short and thick, my lips broad and thin. These are not materials to form a beautiful face. Then I have flabby, lank cheeks, and long features, which suit ill with my low stature. My waist and my legs are equally clumsy. Undoubtedly I must appear to be an odious little wretch; and had I not a tolerabyl good character, no creature could enduer I am sure a person must be a conjuror to judge by my eyes that I have a grain of wit." me. FORCIBLE ABDUCTION. The following singular circumstance is related by Dr. Whitaker in his History of Craven : Gilbert Plumpton, in the 21 of Henry II., committed something like an Irish marriage with the heiress of Richard Warelwas, and thereby incurred the displeasure of Ranulph de Glanville, great justiciary, who meant to have married her to a dependant of his own. Plumpton was in consequence indicted and convicted of a rape at Worcester; but at the very moment when the rope was fixed, and the executioner was drawing the culprit up to the gallows, Baldwin, bishop of Worcester, running to the place, forbade the officer of justice, in the name of the Almighty, to proceed: and thus saved the criminal's life. TREASURE DIGGING. A patent passed the great seal in the fifteenth year of James I., which is to be found in Rymer," to allow to Mary Middlemore, one of the maydes of honor to our deerest consort queen Anne, (of Denmark,) and her deputies, power and authority, to enter into the abbies of Saint Albans, Glassenbury, Saint Edmundsbury, and Ramsay, and into all lands, houses, and places, within a mile, belonging to said abbies;" there to dig, and search after treasure, supposed to be hidden in such places. ⚫ H. J. Pye. POLITENESS. A polite behaviour can never be long maintained without a real wish to please; and such a wish is a proof of good-nature. No ill-natured man can be long well-bred. No good-natured man, however unpolished in his manners, can ever be essentially illbred. From an absurd prejudice with regard to good-nature, some people affect to substitute good temper for it; but no qualities can be more distinct: many goodtempered people, as well as many fools, are very ill-natured; and many men of first-rate genius-with which perhaps entire good temper is incompatible-are perfectly good-natured. A FRENCH TRIBUTE TO ENGLISH The Viscount de Chateaubriand gratefully memorializes his respect for the virtue of a distressed family in London by the following touching narrative prefixed to his Indian tale, entitled "The Natchez :" When I quitted England in 1800 to return to France, under a fictitious name, I durst not encumber myself with too much baggage. I left, therefore, most of my manuscripts in London. Among these manuscripts was that of The Natchez, no other part of which I brought to Paris but René, Atala, and some passages descriptive of America. re Fourteen years elapsed before the communication with Great Britain was newed. At the first moment of the Restoration I scarcely thought of my papers; and if I had, how was I to find them again? They had been left locked up in a trunk with an Englishwoman, in whose house I had lodged in London. I had forgot ten the name of this woman; the name of the street and the number of the house had likewise escaped my memory. In consequence of some vague and even contradictory information which I transmitted to London, Messrs. de Thuisy took the trouble to make inquiries, which they prosecuted with a zeal and perseverance rarely equalled. With infinite pains they at length discovered the house where I resided at the west end of the town; but my landlady had been dead several years, and no one knew what had become of her children. Pursuing, however, the clue which they had obtained, Messrs. de Thuisy, after many fruitless excursions, at last found out her family in a village several miles from London. Had they kept all this time the trunk of an emigrant, a trunk full of old papers, which could scarcely be deciphered? Might they not have consigned to the flames such a useless heap of French manuscripts? On the other hand, if my name, bursting from its obscurity, had attracted, in the London journals, the notice of the children of my former landlady, might they not have been disposed to make what profit they could of those papers, which would then acquire a certain value? Nothing of the kind had happened. The manuscripts had been preserved, the trunk had not even been opened. A religious fidelity had been shown by an unfortunate family towards a child of misfortune. I had committed with simplicity the result 416 of the labours of part of my life to the honesty of a foreign trustee, and my treasure was restored to me with the same simplicity. I know not that I ever met with any thing in my life which touched me more than the honesty and integrity of this poor English family. DEVONSHIRE WRESTLING. For the Table Book. pion, and his brother wrestlers of that Abraham Cann, the Devonshire chamcounty, are objected to for their play with shire; or, to speak plainly, "kicking." the foot, called "showing a toe" in DevonPerhaps neither the objectors, nor Abraham and his fellow-countrymen, are aware, that the Devonshire custom was also the custom thousand years ago. The English reader of the Greeks, in the same sport, three may derive proof of this from Pope's translation of Homer's account of the wrestling match at the funeral of Patroclus, between Ulysses and Ajax, for prizes offered by Achilles : Scarce did the chief the vigorous strife propose, Below, their planted feet, at distance fixt. thighs Swell to each gripe, and bloody tumours rise. The watchful caution of his artful foe. Prove we our force, and Jove the rest decree : He said, and straining, heav'd him off the ground Here we find not only "the lock," but I. V. Penn and the Indians. Yet thus could, in a savage-styled land, A few-reviled, scorn'd, hated of the whole- They pray'd no vengeance on the perjured soul: This stanza is in a delightful little volume, entitled "The Desolation of Eyam; the Emigrant, a tale of the American Woods; and other poems: By William and Mary Howitt, authors of the Forest Minstrel, &c." The feeling and beauty of one of the poems, "Penn and the Indians," suggested the present engraving, after a celebrated print from a picture by the late Benjamin West. The following particulars are chiefly related by Mr. Clarkson, respecting the scene it represents. King Charles II., in consideration of a considerable sum due from the crown for the services of admiral sir William Penn, granted to his son, the ever-memorable VOL. II.-41. William Penn, and his heirs, in perpetuity, a great tract of land on the river Delaware, in America; with full power to erect a new colony there, to sell lands, to make laws, to create magistrates, and to pardon crimes. In August, 1682, Penn, after having written to his wife and children a letter eminently remarkable for its simplicity and patriarchal spirit, took an affectionate leave of them; and, accompanied by several friends, embarked at Deal, on board the Welcome, a ship of three hundred tons burthen. The passengers, including himself, were not more than a hundred. They were chiefly quakers, and most of them from Sussex, in which county his house at THE TABLE BOOK. Warminghurst was seated. They sailed about the first of September, but had not proceeded far to sea, when the small-pox broke out so virulently, that thirty of their number died. In about six weeks from the time of their leaving the Downs they came in sight of the American coast, and shortly afterwards landed at Newcastle, in the Delaware river. William Penn's first business was to explain to the settlers of Dutch and Swedish extraction the object of his coming, and the nature of the government he designed to establish. His next great movement was to Upland, where he called the first general assembly, consisting of an equal number, for the province and for the territories, of all such freemen as chose to attend. In this assembly the frame of government, and many important regulations, were settled; and subsequently he endeavoured to settle the boundaries of his territory with Charles lord Baltimore, a catholic nobleman, who was governor and proprietor of the adjoining province of Maryland, which had been settled with persons of his own persuasion. Penn's religious principles, which led him to the practice of the most scrupulous morality, did not permit him to look upon the king's patent, or legal possession according to the laws of England, as sufficient to establish his right to the country, without purchasing it by fair and open bargain of the natives, to whom, only, it properly be longed. He had therefore instructed commissioners, who had arrived in America before him, to buy it of the latter, and to make with them at the same time a treaty of eternal friendship. This the commissioners had done; and this was the time when, by mutual agreement between him and the Indian chiefs, it was to be publicly ratified. He proceeded, therefore, accompanied by his friends, consisting of men, women, and young persons of both sexes, to Coaquannoc, the Indian name for the place where Philadelphia now stands. On his arrival there he found the Sachems and their tribes assembling. They were seen in the woods as far as the eye could carry, and looked frightful both on account of their number and their arms. are reported to have been but a handful in The quakers comparison, and these without any weapon; so that dismay and terror had come upon them, had they not confided in the righteousness of their cause. It is much to be regretted, when we have accounts of minor treaties between William Penn and the Indians, that there is not in any historian an account of this, though so 420 many mention it, and though all concur in considering it as the most glorious of any in the annals of the world. There are, however, relations in Indian speeches, and traditions in quaker families, descended from those who were present on the occasion, from which we may learn something concerning it. It appears that, though the parties were to assemble at Coaquannoc, Shackamaxon. Upon this Kensington now the treaty was made a little higher up, at stands; the houses of which may be considered as the suburbs of Philadelphia. There was at Shackamaxon an elm tree of a prodigious size. both sides repaired, approaching each other To this the leaders on under its widely-spreading branches. William Penn appeared in his usual clothes. He had no crown, sceptre, mace, sword, halberd, or any insignia of eminence. He blue sash round his waist, which was was distinguished only by wearing a skymade of silk net-work, and which was of no larger apparent dimensions than an officer's military sash, and much like it except in colour. On his right hand secretary, and on his left his friend was colonel Markham, his relation and Pearson; after whom followed a train various articles of merchandise; which, of quakers. Before him were carried when they came near the Sachems, were spread upon the ground. He held a roll of parchment, containing the confirmation hand. One of the Sachems, who was the of the treaty of purchase and amity, in his chief of them, then put upon his own head a kind of chaplet, in which appeared a small horn. This, as among the primitive language, was an emblem of kingly power; eastern nations, and according to Scripture and whenever the chief, who had a right to wear it, put it on, it was understood that the place was made sacred, and the persons this horn the Indians threw down their of all present inviolable. Upon putting on bows and arrows, and seated themselves round their chiefs in the form of a halfthen announced to William Penn, by means moon upon the ground. The chief Sachem of an interpreter, that the nations were ready to hear him. The Great Spirit, he said, who made him Having been thus called upon, he began. and them, who ruled the heaven and the earth, and who knew the innermost thoughts hearty desire to live in peace and friendship of man, knew that he and his friends had a This sash is now in the possession of Thomas Kett, |