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The Reynolds Gallery.

(The Examiner, 6th June, 1813.)

THE Reynolds Gallery has, upon the whole, disappointed me. Some of the portraits are interesting. They are faces of characters whom we (middle-aged gentlemen) were born a little too late to remember, but about whom we have heard our fathers tell stories till we almost fancy to have seen them. There is a charm in the portrait of a Rodney or a Keppel, which even a picture of Nelson must want for me. I should turn away after a slight inspection from the best likeness that could be made of Mrs. Anne Clarke; but Kitty Fisher is a considerable personage. Then the dresses of some of the women so exactly remind us of modes which we can just recall; of the forms under which the venerable relationship of aunt or mother first presented themselves to our young eyes; the aprons, the coifs, the lappets, the hoods. Mercy on us! what a load of head ornaments seem to have conspired to bury a pretty face in the picture of Mrs. Long, yet could not! Beauty must have some charmed life' to have been able to surmount the conspiracy of fashion in those days to destroy it.

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The portraits which least pleased me were those boys as infant Bacchuses, Jupiters, &c. But the artist is not to be blamed for the disguise. No doubt the parents wished to see their children deified in their lifetime. It was but putting a thunderbolt (instead of a squib) into young master's hands; and a whey-faced chit was transformed into the infant ruler of Olympus, --him who was afterward to shake heaven and earth with his black brow. Another good boy pleased his grandmamma so well, and the blameless dotage of the good old woman imagined in him an adequate representative of the awful Prophet Samuel. But the great historical compositions, where the artist was at liberty to paint from his own idea,-the Beaufort and the Ugolino: why then, I must confess, pleading the liberty of table talk for my presumption, that they have not left any very elevating impression on my mind. Pardon a ludicrous comparison. I know, madam, you admire them both; but placed opposite to each other as they are at the gallery, as if to set the one work in competition with the other, they did remind me of the famous contention for the prize of deformity, mentioned in the 173d Number of the Spectator. The one stares, and the other grins; but is there common dignity in their countenances? Does anything of the history of their life gone by peep through the ruins of the mind in the face, like the unconquerable grandeur that surmounts the distortions of the Laocoon? The figures which stand by the bed of Beaufort are indeed happy representations of the plain unmannered old nobility of the English historical plays of Shakspere; but, for anything else; -Give me leave to recommend those macaroons.

After leaving the Reynolds Gallery (where, upon the whole, I received a good deal of pleasure), and feeling that I had quite had my fill of paintings, I stumbled upon a picture in Piccadilly (No. 22, I think), which purports to be a portrait of Francis the First, by Leonardo da Vinci. Heavens, what a difference! It is but a portrait, as most of those I had been seeing; but, placed by them, it would kill them, swallow them up as Moses' rod the other rods. Where did these old painters get their models? I see no figures, not in my dreams, as this Francis, in the character, or rather with the attributes, of John the Baptist. A more than martial majesty in the brow and upon the eyelid ; an arm, mus

cular, beautifully formed; the long, graceful, massy fingers compressing, yet so as not to hurt, a lamb more lovely, more sweetly shrinking, than we can conceive that milk-white one which followed Una; the picture altogether looking as if it were eternal,-combining the truth of flesh with a promise of permanence like marble.

Leonardo, from the one or two specimens we have of him in England, must have been a stupendous genius. I can scarce think he has had his full famele who could paint that wonderful personification of the Logos, or second person of the Trinity, grasping a globe, late in the possession of Mr. Troward of Pall Mall, where the hand was, by the boldest licence, twice as big as the truth of drawing warranted; yet the effect, to every one that saw it, by some magic of genius was confessed to be not monstrous, but miraculous and silencing. It could not be gainsaid.

Richard Brome's "Jobial Crew."

(The Examiner, 4th July, 1819.)

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THE Jovial Crew, or the Merry Beggars, has been revived here [at the English opera] after an interval, as the bills tell us, of seven years. Can it be so long (it seems but yesterday) since we saw poor Lovegrove in Justice Clack? His childish treble still pipes in our ears; Whip 'em, whip 'em, whip 'em." Dowton was the representative of the Justice the other night, and shook our ribs most incontinently. He was in "excellent foolery," and our lungs crowed chanticleer. Yet it appears to us that there was a still higher strain of fatuity in his predecessor-that his eyes distilled a richer dotage. Perhaps, after all, it was an error of the memory. Defunct merit comes out upon us strangely.

Easy natural Wrench was the Springlove; too comfortable a personage perhaps to personify Springlove, in whom the voice of the bird awakens a restless instinct of roaming that had slept during the winter. Miss Stevenson certainly leaves us nothing to regret for the absence of the lady, however agreeable, who formerly performed the part of Meriel. Miss Stevenson is a fine open-countenanced lass, with glorious girlish manners. But the Princess of Mumpers, and Lady Paramount of beggarly counterfeit accents, was she that played Rachel. Her gabbling lachrymose petitions; her tones, such as we have heard by the side of old woods, when an irresistible face has come peeping on one on a sudden; with her full black locks, and a voice-how shall we describe it ?—a voice that was by nature meant to convey nothing but truth and goodness, but warped by circumstance into an assurance that she is telling us a lie that catching twitch of the thievish irreprovable finger-those ballad-singers' notes, so vulgar, yet so unvulgar-that assurance so like impudence and yet so many countless leagues removed from it-her jeers, which we had rather stand, than be caressed with other ladies' compliments, a summer's day long-her face, with a wild out-of-doors grace upon it

Altogether, a brace of more romantic she-beggars it was never our fortune to meet in this supplicatory world. The youngest might have sat for " pretty Bessy," whose father was an Earl, and whose legend stiil adorns the front of mine hostess's doors at Bethnal-Green; and the other could be no less than

the "Beggar Maid" whom "King Cophetua wooed." "What a lass that were," said a stranger who sate beside us, speaking of Miss Kelly in Rachel, "to go a-gypsying through the world with.' We confess we longed to drop a tester in her lap, she begged so masterly.

By-the-way, this is the true Beggar's Opera. The other should have been called the Mirror for Highwaymen. We wonder the Societies for the Suppression of Mendicity (and other good things) do not club for the putting down of this infamous protest in favour of air, and clear liberty, and honest licence, and blameless assertion of man's original blest charter of blue skies, and vagrancy, and nothing-to-do.

Isaac Bickerstaff's "Hypocrite."

(The Examiner, 1st August, 1819.)

By one of those strange perversions which actuate poor mortals in the place of motives (to persuade us into the notion that we are free agents, we presume), we had never till the other evening seen Dowton [at the English Opera] in Doctor Cantwell. By a pious fraud of Mr. Arnold's, who by a process as simple as some of those by which Mathews metamorphoses his person, has converted the play into an opera, - a conversion, by-the-way, for which we are highly indebted to him,- -we have been favoured with this rich novelty at our favourite theatre. It seems a little unreasonable to come lagging in with a posthumous testimony to the merits of a performance of which the town has long rung, but we cannot help remarking in Mr. Dowton's acting, the subtle gradations of the hypocrisy; the length to which it runs in proportion as the recipient is capable of taking it in; the gross palpable way in which he administers the dose in wholesale to old Lady Lambert, that rich fanatic; the somewhat more guarded manner in which he retails it out, only so much a time as he can bear, to the somewhat less bitten fool her son; and the almost absence of it before the younger members of the family, when nobody else is by; how the cloven foot peeps out a little and a little more, till the diabolical nature is stung out at last into full manifestation of its horrid self. What a grand insolence in the tone which he assumes, when he commands Sir John to quit his house; and then the tortures and agonies when he is finally baffled ! It is in these last perhaps that he is greatest, and we should be doing injustice not to compare this part of the performance with, and in some respects to give it the preference above, the acting of Mr. Kean, in a situation nearly analogous, at the conclusion of the City Madam. Cantwell reveals his pangs with quite as much force, and without the assistance of those contortions which transform the detected Luke into the similitude of a mad tiger, or a foaming demon. Dowton plays it neither like beast nor demon, but simply as it should be, a bold bad man pushed to extremity. Humanity is never once overstepped. Has it ever been noticed, the exquisite modulation with which he drawls out the word "Charles," when he calls his secretary, so humble, so seraphic, so resigned. The most diabolical of her sex that we ever knew accented all her honey devil words in just such a hymn-like smoothness. The spirit of Whitfield seems hovering in the air, to suck the blessed tones

so much like his own upon earth; Lady Huntingdon claps her neat white wings, and gives it out again in heaven to the sainted ones, in approbation. Miss Kelly is not quite at home in Charlotte; she is too good for such parts. Her cue is to be natural; she cannot put on the modes of artificial life, and play the coquette as it is expected to be played. There is a frankness in her tones which defeats her purposes; we could not help wondering why her lover (Mr. Pearman) looked so rueful; we forgot that she was acting airs and graces, as she seemed to forget it herself, turning them into a playfulness which could breed no doubt for a moment which way her inclinations ran. She is in truth not framed to tease or torment even in jest, but to utter a hearty Yes or No; to yield or refuse assent with a noble sincerity. We have not the pleasure of being acquainted with her, but we have been told that she carries the same cordial manners into private life. We have heard, too, of some virtues which she is in the practice of; but they are of a description which repay themselves, and with them neither we nor the public have anything to do.

One word about Wrench who played the Colonel :-Was this man never unhappy? It seems as if care never came near him, as if the black ox could never tread upon his foot; we want something calamitous to befall him, to bring him down to us. It is a shame he should be suffered to go about with his well-looking happy face and tones insulting us thin race of irritable and irritable-making critics.

New Pieces at the Lyceum.

(The Examiner, 8th August, 1819.)

[Prefixed to this criticism by Charles Lamb was the following editorial note from the hand of Leigh Hunt.]

Here had

[WE must make the public acquainted with a hard case of ours. we been writing a long, elaborate, critical, and analytical account of the new pieces at the Lyceum, poring over the desk for two hours in the morning after a late night, and melting away what little had been left of our brains and nerves from the usual distillation of the week, when an impudent rogue of a friend, whose most daring tricks and pretences carry as good a countenance with them as virtues in any other man, and who has the face above all to be a better critic than ourselves, sends us the following remarks of his own on those two. very pieces. What do we do? The self-love of your inferior critic must vent itself somehow; and so we take this opportunity of showing our virtue at the expense of our talents, and fairly making way for the interloper.

Dear, nine, closely-written octavo pages! you were very good, after all, between you and me; and should have given way to nobody else. If there is room left, a piece of you shall be got in at the end; for virtue is undoubtedly its own reward, but not quite.]

A plot has broke out at this theatre. Some quarrel has been breeding between the male and female performers, and the women have determined to set up for

themselves. Seven of them, Belles without Beaux they call themselves, have undertaken to get up a piece without any assistance from the men, and in our opinion have established their point most successfully. There is Miss Carew with her silvery tones, and Miss Stevenson with her delicious mixture of the school-girl and the waiting-maid, and Miss Kelly, sure to be first in any mischief, and Mrs. Chatterly, with some of the best acting we have ever witnessed, and Miss Love, worthy of the name, and Mrs. Grove that rhymes to her, and Mrs. Richardson who might in charity have been allowed somewhat a larger portion of the dialogue. The effect was enchanting. We mean for once. We do not want to encourage these Amazonian vanities. Once or twice we longed to have Wrench bustling among them. A lady who sate near us was observed to gape for want of variety. To us it was delicate quintessence, an apple-pie made all of quinces. We remember poor Holcroft's last comedy, which positively died from the opposite excess; it was choked up with men, and perished from a redundancy of male population. It had nine principal men characters in it, and but one woman, and she of no very ambiguous character. Mrs. Harlow, to do the part justice, chose to play it in scarlet.

We did not know Mrs. Chatterly's merits before; she plays, with downright sterling good acting, a prude who is to be convinced out of her prudery by Miss Kelly's (we did not catch her stage name) assumption of the dress and character of a brother of seventeen, who makes the prettiest unalarming platonic approaches; and in the shyest mark of moral battery, no one step of which you can detect, or say this is decidedly going too far, vanquishes at last the ice of her scruples, brings her into an infinite scrape, and then with her own infinite good humour sets all to right, and brings her safe out of it again with an explanation. Mrs. Chatterly's embarrassments were masterly. Miss Stevenson her maid's start at surprising a youth in her mistress's closet at midnight, was quite as good. Miss Kelly we do not care to say anything about, because we have been accused of flattering her. The truth is, this lady puts so much intelligence and good sense into every part which she plays, that there is no expressing an honest sense of her merits, without incurring a suspicion of that sort. But what have we to gain by praising Miss Kelly?

Altogether, this little feminine republic, this provoking experiment, went off most smoothly. What a nice world it would be, we sometimes think, all women! but then we are afraid, we slip in a fallacy unawares into the hypothesis; we somehow edge in the idea of ourselves as spectators or something among them.

We saw Wilkinson after it in Walk for à Wager. What a picture of forlorn hope! of abject orphan destitution! he seems to have no friends in the world but his legs, and he plies them accordingly. He goes walking on like a perpetual motion. His continual ambulatory presence performs the part of a Greek chorus. He is the walking gentleman of the piece; a peripatetic that would make a stoic laugh. He made us cry. His Muffincap in Amateurs and Actors is just such another piece of acting. We have seen charity boys, both of St. Clement's and Farringdon Without, looking just as old, ground down out of all semblance of youth, by abject and hopeless neglect-you cannot guess their age between fifteen and fifty. If Mr. Peake is the author of these pieces, he has no reason to be piqued at their reception.

We must apologize for an oversight in our last week's article. The allusion made to Mr. Kean's acting of Luke in the City Madam was totally inapplicable to the part and to the play. We were thinking of his performance of the concluding scenes of The New Way to Pay Old Debts. We confounded one of Massinger's strange heroes with the other. It was Sir Giles Overreach we meant; nor are we sure that our remark was just, even with this explanation. When we consider the intense tone in which Mr. Kean thinks it proper (and he is quite as likely to be in the right as his blundering critic) to pitch the tem

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