CHARACTERS OF JUDGE BEST AND MR. SCARLETT,

AS BARRISTERS.

Mr. Sergeant Best, is, as the old woman would say, as sharp as a needle. His eye is peculiarly brilliant, and he presses his lips together, and shakes his head, with an air of determination, which makes his audience think he is sure of his verdict.

This gentleman must not be confounded with Mr. Best the barrister, who is generally called Second Best, but who as a lawyer, in the opinion of some, ought rather to be designated First Best. There are jokes like this in every profession; and it is only for the sake of the pun, that Mr. Scarlett is called the deepest red man at the bar.

ON THE CUSTOM OF HISSING AT THE THEATRES, WITH
SOME ACCOUNT OF A CLUB OF DAMNED AUTHORS,

BY ONE OF ITS MEMBERS.

Authors.

am willing to put a favourable construction upon the votes that were given against us; I believe that there was no bribery or designed partiality in the case ;only "our nonsense did not happen to suit their nonsense;" that was all. But against the manner in which the public on these occasions think fit to deliver their disapprobation, I must and ever will protest. Sir, imagine but you have been present at the damning of a piece-those who never had that felicity, I beg them to imagine-a vast theatre, like that which Drury-lane was, before it was a heap of dust and ashes-a theatre like that, filled with all sorts of disgusting sounds,-shrieks, groans, hisses, but chiefly the last, like the noise of many waters, or that which Don Quixote heard from the fulling-mills, or that wilder combination of devilish sounds which St. Anthony listened to in the

wilderness.

I am one of those persons whom the world has I never shall forget the sounds on my night; I thought proper to designate by the title of Damned never before that time fully felt the reception which In that memorable season of dramatic the Author of All Ill in the Paradise Lost meets with failures, 1806-7, in which no fewer, I think, than from the critics in the pit, at the final close of his two tragedies, four comedies, one opera, and three tragedy upon the human race-though that, alas! farces, suffered at Drury-lane theatre, I was found met with too much success— from innumerable tongues, guilty of constructing an afterpiece, and was damned. Against the decision of the public in such instances there can be no appeal. The clerk of Chatham might as well have protested against the decision of Cade and his followers, who were then the public. Like him I was condemned, because I could write. Not but it did appear to some of us, that the measures of the popular tribunal at that period savoured a little of harshness and of the summum jus. The public For hall substitute theatre, and you have the very mouth was early in the season fleshed upon the Vin-image of what takes place at what is called the damdictive Man, and some pieces of that nature, and it retained through the remainder of it a relish of blood. As Dr. Johnson would have said, sir, there was a habit of sibilation in the house.

Still less am I disposed to inquire into the reason of the comparative lenity, on the other hand, with which some pieces were treated, which, to indifferent judges, seemed at least as much deserving of condemnation as some of those which met with it. I

A dismal universal hiss, the sound
Of public scorn.- Dreadful was the d
Of hissing through the hall, thick swarming now
With complicated monsters, head and tail,
Scorpion and asp, and Amphisbona dire,
Cerastes horn'd, Hydrus, and Elops drear,
And Dipsas.

nation of a piece, and properly so called; for here you see its origin plainly, whence the custom was derived, and what the first piece was that so suffered. After this none can doubt the propriety of the appellation.

Indeed, I have often wondered that some modest critic has not proposed, that there should be a wooden machine to that effect erected in some convenient part of the proscenium, which an unsuccessful au

thor should be required to mount, and stand his hour, who will not give a plain man leave to enjoy an

exposed to the apples and oranges of the pit ;-this amende honorable would well suit with the meanness of some authors, who in their prologues fairly prostrate their sculls to the audience, and seem to invite a pelting. Or why should they not have their pens publicly broke over their heads, as the swords of recreant knights in old times were, and an oath administered to them that they should never write again.

evening's entertainment, but with their frothy jargon, and incessant finding of faults, either drown his pleasure quite, or force him in his own defence to join in their clamorous censure. The hiss always originates with these. When this creature springs his rattic, you would think, from the noise it makes, there was something in it; but you have only to examine the instrument from which the noise proceeds, and you will find it typical of a critic's tongue, a shallow membrane, empty, voluble, and seated in the most contemptible part of the creature's body.

The Whip Snake. This is he that lashes the poor author the next day in the newspapers.

The provocations to which a dramatic genius is exposed from the public are so much the more vexatious, as they are removed from any possibility of retaliation, the hope of which sweetens most other injuries-for the public never writes itself.-Not The Deaf Adder, or Surda Echidna of Linnæts but something very like it took place at the time of-Under this head may be classed all that portion of the O.-P. differences. The placards which were the spectators (for audience they properly are not) nightly exhibited, were, properly speaking, the com- who not finding the first act of a piece answer to their position of the public. The public wrote them, the preconceived notions of what a first act should be, public applauded them, and precious morceaux of like Obstinate, in John Bunyan, posnively thrust wit and eloquence they were; except some few, of their fingers in their ears, that they may not hear a a better quality, which it is well known were fur-word of what is coming, though perhaps the very nished by professed dramatic writers. After this next act may be composed in a style as different s specimen of what the public can do for itself, it should possible, and be written quite to their own tastes be a little slow in condemning what others do for it. These adders refuse to hear the voice of the charmer, As the degrees of malignancy vary in people accord-because the tuning of his instrument gave them ing as they have more or less of the Old Serpent (the father of hisses) in their composition, I have sometimes amused myself with analyzing this many-headed hydra, which calls itself the public, into the component parts of which it is "complicated, head and tail," and seeing how many varieties of the snake

kind it can afford.

First, there is the Common English Snake.-This is that part of the auditory who are always the majority at damnations, but who, having no critical venom in themselves to sting them on, stay till they hear others hiss, and then join in for company.

The Blind Worm is a species very nearly allied to the foregoing. Some naturalists have doubted whether they are not the same.

offence.

I should weary my reader and myself too, if I were to go through all the classes of the serpent kind. Two qualities are common to them all. They are creatures of remarkably cold digestions, chiefly haunt pits and low grounds.

I proceed with more pleasure to give an account of a club to which I have the honour to belong. There are fourteen of us, who are all authors that have been once in our lives what is called damars, We meet on the anniversaries of our respective listës, and make ourselves merry at the expense of the pbhic. The chief tenets which distinguish our scerty, and which every man among us is bound to hold for gospel, are,

The Rattle Snake.-These are your obstreporous That the public, or mob, in all ages, have been talking critics, the impertinent guides of the pit, a set of blind, deaf, obstinate, senseless, iterate

avages. That no man of genius in his senses would | the proposition, we lost the benefit of that highly sabe ambitious of pleasing such a capricious, ungrate-lutary and antidotal dish. The privilege of admis"ful rabble. That the only legitimate end of writing sion to our club is strictly limited to such as have for them is to pick their pockets, and, that failing, we are at full liberty to vilify and abuse them as much as ever we think fit.

been fairly damned. A piece that has met with ever so little applause, that has but languished its night or two, and then gone out, will never entitle its author to a seat among us. An exception to our usual readiness in conferring this privilege is, in the case of a writer, who, having been once condemned, writes again, and becomes candidate for a second martyrdom. Simple damnation we hold to be a merit, but to be twice damned we adjudge infamous. Such a one we utterly reject, and black ball without a

The common damn'd shun his society. Hoping that this publication of our regulations may be a means of inviting some more members into our society, I conclude this history.

That authors, by their affected pretences to humility, which they made use of as a cloak to insinuate their writings into the callous senses of the multitude, obtuse to every thing but the grossest flattery, have by degrees made that great beast their master; as we may act submission to children till we are obliged to practise it in earnest. That authors are and ought to be considered the masters and preceptors of the pub-hearing: lic, and not vice versa. That it was so in the days of Orpheus, Linus, and Musæus, and would be so again, if it were not that writers prove traitors to themselves. That in particular, in the days of the first of those three great authors just mentioned, audiences appear to have been perfect models of what audiences should be; for though along with the trees and the rocks and the wild creatures, which he drew after him to listen to his strains, some serpents doubt less came to hear his music, it does not appear that any one among them ever lifted up a dissentient voice. They knew what was due to authors in those days. stock and stone turns into a serpent, and

Now every has a voice.

SEMEL-DAMNATUS.

PREMATURE FRUIT.

at the theatre, when he had somewhat recovered from An auther had just seen one of his pieces damned the mortification of this fall, he went to visit the actress who had played the principal part; he told her, in the hope that she would say something to console him, that the public was not always just, that, besides, his friends were wrong for having That the terms "Courteous Reader" and "Can-pressed him so much to write, and that the fruit was did Auditors," as having given rise to a false notion not yet ripe." Oh, ripe or not," replied the actress, in those to whom they were applied, as if they conit has, however, fallen." ferred upon them some right, which they cannot have, of exercising their judgments, ought to be utterly banished and exploded,

SPANISH PRIDE.

The

A Spanish ambassador was one day vaunting to These are our distinguishing tenets. To keep up Henry IV. of France, the power of his master. the memory of the cause in which we suffered, as king, in order to take down the Spaniard's vanity, the ancients sacrificed a goat, a supposed unhealthy | observed to him, with a lively air of raillery, that if animal, to Esculapius, on our feast-nights we cut up a goose, an animal typical of the popular voice, to the deities of Candour and Patient Hearing. A zealous member of the society once proposed that we should revive the obsolete luxury of viper-broth; but the stomachs of some of the company rising at

he were to take it into his head to get on horseback, he could go and breakfast at Milan, hear mass at Rome, and dine at Naples. Sire," replied the ambassador, "if your majesty travels so fast, you might also go and hear vespers at Sicily on the same day."

lined, and ruffled with fine crape; a handsome crape had been more solicitous to defend it from dishonours shroud, cap, and pillow. For use, a handsome velvet at its dissolution, than careful to pamper it with good pall, three gentlemen's cloaks, three crape hatbands, things in the time of its union. If Cæsar were three hoods and scarfs, and six pair of gloves; two chiefly anxious at his death how he might die most porters equipped to attend the funeral, a man to at- decently, every Burial Society may be considered as a tend the same with band and gloves; also the burial club of Cæsars. fees paid, if not exceeding one guinea."

Man," says Sir Thomas Browne, "is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave." Whoever drew up this little advertisement, certainly understood this appetite in the species, and has made abundant provision for it. It really almost induces a tædium vitæ upon one to read it. Methinks I could be willing to die, in death to be so attended. The two rows all round close-drove best black japanned nails. how feelingly do they invite and almost irresistibly persuade us to come and be fastened down. What aching head can resist the temptation to repose, which the crape shroud, the cap, and the pillow, present? what sting is there in death, which the handles with wrought gripes are not calculated to pluck away? what victory in the grave, which the drops and the velvet pall do not render at least extremely disputable? but above all, the pretty emblematic plate with angel above and flower beneath, takes me mightily.

Nothing tends to keep up in the imaginations of the poorer sort of people a generous horror of the workhouse more than the manner in which pauper funerals are conducted in this metropolis. The coitin nothing but a few naked planks, coarsely put together, the want of a pall (that decent and well-imagined veil, which, hiding the coffin that hides the body, keeps that which would shock us at two removes from us), the coloured coats of the men that are hired, at cheap rates, to carry the body,-altogether, give the notion of the deceased having been some person of an ill-life and conversation, some one who may not claim the entire rites of burial,- -one by whom some parts of the sacred ceremony would be desecrated if they should be bestowed upon him. I meet these meagre processions sometimes in the street. They are sure to make me out of humour and melarecholy all the day after. They have a harsh and ominous aspect.

If there is any thing in the prospectus issued from Mr. Middleton's, Stonecutter's-street, which pleases me less than the rest, it is to find, that the six pair of gloves are to be returned, that they are only lent, as the bill expresses it, for use, on the occasion. The hoods, scarfs, and hatbands, may properly enough be given up after the solemnity; the cloaks no gentleman would think of keeping; but a pair of gloves, once fitted on, ought not in courtesy to be redemanded. The wearer should certainly have the

The notice goes on to inform us, that though the society has been established but a very few years, upwards of eleven hundred persons have put down their names. It is really an affecting consideration to think of so many poor people, of the industrious and hard-working class (for none but such would be possessed of such a generous forethought) clubbing their twopences to save the reproach of a parish funeral. Many a poor fellow, I dare swear, has that angel and flower kept from the Angel and Punch-fee-simple of them. The cost would be but trifling, bowl, while, to provide himself a bier, he has curtailed himself of beer. Many a savoury morsel has the living body been deprived of, that the lifeless one might be served up in a richer state to the worms. And sure, if the body could understand the actions of the soul, and entertained generous notions of things, it would thank its provident partner, that she

and they would be a proper memorial of the day. This part of the proposals wants reconsidering. It is not conceived in the same liberal way of thinking as the rest. I am also a little doubtful whether the limit, within which the burial-fee is made payable, should not be extended to thirty shillings.

Some provision too ought to be made in favour of