dows close up. Eight inside horrible,

most horrible! I was stewed-but it rained the whole night, and I was obliged to endure it. I was compelled to have recourse to violent rage and ridicule wherever I could address the guard, to get any air at all. So, after all the pains and trouble to myself to avoid travelling at night in the

mail, I exchanged it for the heavy Liverpool, (a term I shall never forget.) To travel all night with eight people, and that the night before I perform! However, its all over, and I am well."

One piece of his ill luck was to suffer for the rogueries and absurdities of would-be rivals, some of whom adopted his style, and others bore, or borrowed, his name. About this time, when he was playing at Gravesend, a sort of military-looking servant applied to him for "an admission to the theatre." Mathews asked, on what ground. The fellow said, that Mrs Mathews knew him very well, and that she would have given it him, if she were there. And, on being asked "where he had known the lady," his answer was equally prompt and startling. "Oh, very well, when she lived with Captain Silcox of the 10th. I lived with the Captain then, before she ran along with you." In fact, there had been a stroller, who called himself "Mathews, the celebrated comedian," and who had roved the country with the woman in question.

Mathews's sensitiveness to his professional dignity was sometimes amusingly touched. He was in the habit of using oranges and eggs for his voice. Copeland (we presume the manager of the Dover Theatre) saw "four oranges and two eggs in the list furnished. What,' said he to the property man, 'does he do tricks with them? I never heard that before. Why, I saw no conjuring mentioned in the bills.'"

An adventure of the supposed Mrs Mathews, rather oddly stimulates the biographer's recollection of an adventure which promised very nearly to justify the footman's mistake. The lady's expression is, this pleasant

reminiscence of a caprice imputed to me, reminded us of a ridiculous adventure which occurred about two years after our marriage." She tells the story at great length, and evidently con amore; but we must be content with an outline. She and her husband had driven into Kent in a low four

wheeled chaise, and enjoyed fine weather; but, on their return, as they reached Dartford, the weather broke, and they were driven to take shelter in the inn by a sudden storm. This was peculiarly unlucky, as both husband and wife were to play at the Haymarket on that evening. A stage. coach passed, but it was full; a postchaise was ordered, but "all the horses were out." In this dilemma there was nothing for it but to order dinner, and, in case the weather should not clear up, take their chance in the open chaise. However, from this difficulty they were relieved at the close of dinner, by the landlord's coming in to mention that, if the lady would not object to a return chaise, there was one at the gate. To this the lady did object, on the ground that the man might take up other travellers. Finally, the matter was settled by calling in the postboy, and paying him a sum additional, on the express condition that he should not take up any other person by the way. It was necessary that Mrs Mathews should be early in town, as she played in the first piece of the night, and as Mathews played in the last, he was enabled to remain, and bring on the pony. The postchaise was instantly on the road. Immediately after, a hussar officer, who had been dining in the inn, and had seen the departure of the lady alone, ordered his horse and followed her. Mathews perceiving this, and indignant at the possibility of an affront being offered to his wife, left his unfinished dinner on the table, ordered out his chaise, and galloped after her, through the storm. On reaching the parties at last, after a long and desperate chase, he found, to his astonishment, and we have no doubt to his indignation, the officer seated in the carriage. We give Mrs Mathews's own words" He had whipt with such desperate energy, that he had gained ground so rapidly as at length to be near enough to the party in advance for his loud 'halt' to arrest the postilion, and somewhat to startle the occupants of the chaise, which was immediately stopt. Another stroke of his whip brought the pursuer parallel with it, and to the surprise of the young lady, and the confusion of the young gentleman, appeared the soaked and angry husband." The officer immediately got out of the carriage and ran away; the wife was, as she tells us herself, "ordered to descend from the vehicle, and was pulled up hastily into the little chaise." Of the officer's conduct, the narrator says, "that during his continuance in the chaise, all was refined politeness, and as attention was not uncommon to one of my age, that which he paid me was not calculated to startle or displease." What would startle her delicacy or displease her vanity, it would perhaps not be very easy to define; but we should not have been at all surprised if Mr Mathews had instantly sent the lady home to her mamma, if she had

one.

In the autumn of this year he went to Ireland, from which he writes"I have the pleasure to tell you I am safely landed, after a passage of nineteen hours. I was sick the whole of the way, and driven from my usual place, the deck, by rain, which poured all night, and my box-coat proved to be inadequate." On his landing he started for Kilkenny. Ireland, though a theatrical country, seems never to have been a theatrical one for Mathews. They are a people of jokers, and probably a professional joker from England was felt to be de-trop. He made his way into Kilkenny, then a great place for private theatricals, where, of course, his theatricals came to a bad market. Kilkenny has long since abandoned this road to fame, all its theatricals now consisting in the farce of Papist Election, and all its heroes reduced to the mummery of Joseph Hume's patriotism. But, in other days, it exhibited a general conflux of all the neighbouring gentry, and a compilation of amateur abilities, which might have done very well for a minor theatre in London.

Mathews, with his usual. Irish ill luck, arrived just in time to find every spot occupied. " I came here," says his letter to his wife, " on Saturday night, time enough to see Macbeth and High Life Below Stairs. I have no hesitation in saying that they are

not only the best private theatricals I have ever seen, but that the whole play of Macbeth, in point of decoration, scenery, choruses, &c. &c., was better got up than it would have been in any theatre out of London. I was quite astonished, and highly amused with the farce. Crampton and a Mr Corry, in the two servants, inimitable. The latter is really a very fine actor."

But on the main point, his chance of making any addition to his own finance, all was a blank. He predicts the results with all the minuteness of vexation. "As to my performance here, all will be a total failure. I am just in the situation of a benefit at York on the Monday after the race week; and standing at the hotel on Tuesday, and seeing all the company pour out of the town! Kilkenny itself does nothing for the private theatricals. They are supported by families from the neighbourhood, and even as far as Dublin. They finished the plays on Saturday night, and on Sunday began to move. To-night there is a ball and masquerade, given by Major Bryan, and every body is go ing; and to-morrow morning all the horses in the town are ordered, and by night the town will be empty." This was a heap of calamity which might have overwhelmed a less experienced sufferer than Mathews. However, he consoled himself by the reflection, that the people who had thus deserted the town were of the first fashion in Dublin ! Arguing, probably, that as they would not take the trouble to see him in Kilkenny, the consequence was clear, that they would in the capital.

To add to the other discomforts of this man of pleasantry, he was almost a constant sufferer from bodily indisposition. When he had not a broken arm, he had a rheumatism; when he had cured a fractured leg, he got a fever to supply its annoyance; when all else was well, he was regularly visited by some strange torture of the tongue, which swelled to an unusual extent, and alternately threatened dumbness and strangulation. At last he broke his hip, for a permanent occupation; and it employed him during the rest of his days. At this particular period the tongue was the tormentor. He writes

"My tongue is in statu quo, relief appears hopeless. Every medical man I consult, totally disapproves of the mode of treatment resorted to by his predecessor. This is comfortable, and so cheering! I was miserably ill at Kilkenny, and, suspecting the cause, discontinued the medicine for a day or two. On my journey I commenced it again; and it nearly drove me mad. I can conceive nothing more horrible the fever, headache, lassitude, sickness. I was afraid to attempt to walk by myself; my legs tottered under me, and I had the sensation of very drunk yes

right, for he has made it rhyme to pull," (which he also, of course, pronounced like gull.)

From Waterford he writes again; his Irish ill luck never failed him: "This is a wretched place for theatricals the first night very bad. Nobody knew I was to act, till the morning of the day I appeared; and the second night the rain prevented the possibility of people going out. The theatre is only temporary-no boxes; I don't know a human being; but the

،

ill that a physician was sent for, and I was obliged to 'up and tell him' about my tongue. Why, sir, the man who gave you laudanum was mad, and you were mad to take it.' However, certain it is, I got gradually better when I discontinued the laudanum, though it has taken four or five days to drive away the effects from my constitution."

Mathews continually reminds us of the story of Carlini, the memorable mimic, who, going to a physician to complain of desperate dejection, received for answer, that, if he wanted to recover from it, he ought to go and laugh at Carlini! He seems to have been singularly assailed by mental depression, at a time when he was amusing the world. In Dublin he writes to his wife :- "Your letters are a great solace to me, for, in my blue-devil fits, my fiend is ingenious in tormenting, and I am sure to brood on all sorts of imaginary evils. A few lines of Curran's were very congenial to my own feelings, as I read them two or three days back, when wandering all alone on Kilkenny Hill :

"Whether we're sunder'd by the final

In the midst of his sorrows, however, the ancient merriment breaks out, and he gives a happy instance of native criticism. At some exhibition of private theatricals, a gentleman had corrected one of the amateurs, who pronounced the word full like gull. The amateur complied with the hint on the night of performance, but when Mathews next met him at a public table, he cried out to his corrector"You were wrong about that word after all; I have found it in poetry, my boy. Hudibras has it; and I am

and I board with him in a most comfortable and clean house. The boxes are taken for to-night, and the day is beautiful."

All this promised well, but the spell was not to be broken. "I had written thus far," says he, "when the Mayor himself rapt at the door, to say, 'The Queen is dead!' This has so sadly deranged me and my plans, that I know not what to do, or what to say, -the play is stopped, and the poor manager in despair."

But England was always his true anchoring ground; and his next provincial tour made amends for his Hibernian disasters. It has been remarked of actors, that they come nearest to sailors in the labour of their

gains, and the recklessness of their expenditure; and of sailors, that "what they earn like horses, they spend like asses." Mathews had no sooner made a little money, than he took a ninety-nine years' lease of a house and grounds near Highgate, a sufficiently long period at least for his personal tenure; and, as immediately, commenced that happy expedient for getting rid of money, building! He began, too, a collection of theatrical portraits, and for those he built a gallery. Common sagacity might have told him the inordinate expense which this especial addition must have involved. show-room, attached to a show-house, belonging to a man of mirth and countless acquaintanceship, within three miles of all the idlers of London, MUST have been a perpetual inn, and so it happened. The visiters were not to be shut out, nor sent thus time, feasting, and hospitality were in perpetual requisition; and if Matthews had been a keeper of lions, instead of a lion himself, he could not have been more molested by popular curiosity; sometimes civil, sometimes

A

forward, but always obtrusive, and, in the end, intolerable. The result was, and it is difficult to state it without regret, the ruin of this clever man, the abandonment of the villa, on which he had wasted sums fully adequate to have secured to him a handsome competency for life; the sale of his pic tures for little more than a third, perhaps a fourth, of what they had cost; and the consciousness that a little prudence would have relieved him from the most painful sacrifices, have rendered the desperate efforts of his latter years unnecessary, and in all probability have prolonged a life, which mere necessity compelled him to exhaust in the vain attempt to retrieve his broken fortunes.

The volumes contain a number of letters from his friends. One from Poole, the author of one of the most original dramas of the age, Paul Pry, gives an account of a melancholy event which he happened to witness in Paris, (July 1819.)

"A dreadful accident has occurred here, which I saw and heard from my window. Madame Blanchard ascended from Tivoli in a balloon the night before last. It was illuminated, and she carried fire-works with her. Soon after rising, she entered a cloud, and was lost to the sight during several seconds. On re-appearing she let off some of the fire-works, and shortly afterwards I perceived a stream of fire from the lower part of the balloon. In an instant it was in flames, and she fell with a terrible rapidity from a great height, still in her car, struck with a frightful crash on the roof of a house just opposite my window, and thence rebounded into the street. I need scarcely add, that the poor creature was taken up dead. She was buried yesterday. I cannot get rid of the recollection of what I saw and felt at the moment, knowing, as I did, that it was beyond all human power to save her."

To turn from this frightful topic-as Sterne says of the sentimentalist, comical things come in the way of comical men. Mathews dined one day at the barracks in York, on the invitation of one of the officers. A monkey was brought in, after dinner, equipped by them in the full dress of the regiment! He was placed upon the table and drank a glass of wine, bow ing all round. "I laughed myself nearly into fits. You may easily imagine the odd effect, with the complete dress, which cost three guineas. When

the tail was hid, it was a miniature

officer."

Undoubtedly gentlemen have a right to caricature themselves if they please, but Mathews had the additional advantage of picking up a bull. One of the company said, " Colonel Ross brings him (the monkey) upon the table every day, and if you don't immedi. ately give him something, he will throw it at you."

But he caught a still more characteristic speech from the Colonel's servant, "a real Dermot," who, seeing the sun shining strongly in his face, said "Sir, if you please, does the sun disoblige you? If he does, I'll be after putting him out of the room."

All the odd people in England came in the way of Mathews from time to time. One of his curiosities in his visits to the north was the little Polish Count Borolawski. This was the most diminutive of all dwarfs; a little creature, however, of elegant form, graceful manners, and even of considerable accomplishments. Mathewsthus writes from Newcastle, (1819:)

I had £53 at Durham. Mrs Siddons was there; and I dined in her company, at Dr Haggitt's, prebendary of the Cathedral; Count Borolawski, dear fellow, was on the look-out for me with open arms. He begged I would imitate him; I did, and he was in the theatre. I never heard louder shouts. I walked about the streets with him yesterday morning, with his hand in

mine like a child. It is an undoubted fact, that the Count has lately grown an inch, though eighty-one years of age! I measured him years ago; he was certainly only three feet three inches; I measured him yesterday, and he was as certainly three feet four. He said, 'Oh, I grow; in five hundred years I will be big as you; I will be grenadier."

From Newcastle he went to Edinburgh, where he gives the people credit for having had the good taste to like him. Mathews's early feelings bad made him hostile to all the sectaries; for he regarded his father as having been bewildered by them, and his own inheritance as having been plundered in consequence. This made him enjoy the triumph of the following little anecdote: "I have received a letter, (which I will preserve,) from a Methodist preacher here, to say that he was the pastor of a congregation which could not afford to purchase a Bible, and requesting me to make them a present of one, and I did so. I have made a condition, that the following inscription should be upon it

The gift of Charles Mathews, comedian,' It is finished, and will be announced to the congregation next Sunday."

Mathews had the most extraordinary ill luck with respect to weather. Every thunder storm of the summer seemed to be directed at his especial head; if a bridge was broken down, he either went down with it, or escaped only by miracle. If a road was flooded, he inevitably had to swim for his life. Winter warred against him with peculiar malice. He lived in snow-storms, was alternately drenched by torrents of rain, and dried by whirlwinds; and if our country had been fertile in avalanches and volcanoes, he would have been buried in the one and blown up in the other; or rather, if there were but one avalanche and one volcano, he would have been sure to be iced in the one, and been turned into sulphuric acid in the other. And yet we believe him to have been a man of veracity; but it certainly was his chance to meet perpetual scrapes

of all kinds. This was in some measure to be accounted for by the rambling life which he led, crossing the empire at all times and seasons; still the proverb is true; Il n'y a que bonheur et malheur. Luck is every thing; and the Fates had evidently determined that he should encounter every possible accident, short of being hanged. He writes from Dumfries an account of a November adventure of this order :

"Did you happen to think of me on Tuesday night about seven o'clock? and did it happen to blow a hurricane at Highgate as it did in Dumfries-shire? If you could, by possibility, have taken a peep at me about that moment, you must have screamed at the sight. We had proceeded from Glasgow to within seven miles of Moffat, where we proposed to stay for the night on our way to this town. There had been a deep snow of three hours' continuance, which was succeeded by a most tremendous storm of wind and rain. Daw (his attendant) was lulled to sleep, and I was enjoying home in perspective, when I was roused from my reverie by frequent warnings from our postilion, as I imagined, to some drivers of carts to keep on their own side. Suddenly a tremendous concussion

shook me directly off my seat, and threw me upon Daw; and in an instant the carriage broke down. George literally shrieked; and on lifting his head from under an umbrella, where he had crouched to protect himself from the storm, felt it instantly ascend (not his head but the umbrella) with the force of the wind; and found himself lying on the road, before he could account for the cause of his sudden removal. As the body of the carriage lay upon the axletree, and the head was up, it was some time before we could scramble out. My first thought was to discover the cause of our misery; and I sent George after the carts; there were about seven or eight without drivers! You may imagine our horror. The concussion was so forcible, that the front spring was forced quite out of its situation, two yards from the carriage, without being broken. Every bolt that attached it to the axletree was completely broken off, and there was apparently no possibility of its being moved from the spot.'

The situation was hopeless enough; but he had not reached the limit of his misfortunes. On the carters coming up, who had been drinking at the toll-bar, and had left their carts to take their chance, it was discovered that the carriage could not be moved until it was repaired. This was a situation! "Seven miles," says he, "from any house but the toll-bar; pouring, blowing, standing up to our ankles in wet, a frightfully bleak and mountainous country. It was too dark to ascertain the extent of our damage; and for the first time since we had come out, we had forgot the candles for ourlamps." Another misfortune then happened. The driver, finding his horses fidgety, took them off to prevent further mischief; the horses, probably seeing the folly of remaining out in the storm, and remembering their stable, instantly took themselves off, on the way to Moffat, with the postilion after them. Even this was not all; the carriage being dragged to the toll-bar by main force; and the post-horses being at last arrested in their flight, it was settled that Mathews should mount one of them, ride to Moffat, and send back a smith with ropes and bolts for the carriage. This was the worst experiment of all. "You may fancy my ride," says the unfortunate equestrian" up mountains and down again, alternate sleet, snow, and pouring rain; and a stumbling old cart-horse, for he was