A Century of Parody and Imitation — A Reader’s Guide

o thought in flames St. James's court to pinch? Who burnt the wardrobe of poor Lady Finch?-- Why he, who, forging for this isle a yoke, Reminds me of a line I lately spoke, 'The tree of freedom is the British oak.' Bless every man possess'd of aught to give; Long may Long Tilney, Wellesley, Long Pole live; God bless the Army, bless their coats of scarlet, God bless the Navy, bless the Princess Charlotte; God bless the Guards, though worsted Gallia scoff, God bless their pig-tails, though they're now cut off; And, oh! in Downing Street should Old Nick revel, England's prime minister, then bless the devil!

Thy lisping prattle and thy mincing gait, All thy false mimic fooleries I hate; For thou art Folly's counterfeit, and she Who is right foolish hath the better plea: Nature's true idiot I prefer to thee. CUMBERLAND.

[_Spoken in the character of Nancy Lake, a girl eight years of age, who is drawn upon the stage in a child's chaise by Samuel Hughes, her uncle's porter._]

My brother Jack was nine in May,[6] And I was eight on New-year's-day; So in Kate Wilson's shop Papa (he's my papa and Jack's) Bought me, last week, a doll of wax, And brother Jack a top.

Jack 's in the pouts, and this it is,-- He thinks mine came to more than his; So to my drawer he goes, Takes out the doll, and, O, my stars! He pokes her head between the bars, And melts off half her nose!

Quite cross, a bit of string I beg, And tie it to his peg-top's peg, And bang, with might and main, Its head against the parlour-door: Off flies the head, and hits the floor, And breaks a window-pane.

This made him cry with rage and spite: Well, let him cry, it serves him right. A pretty thing, forsooth! If he's to melt, all scalding hot, Half my doll's nose, and I am not To draw his peg-top's tooth!

Aunt Hannah heard the window break, And cried, 'O naughty Nancy Lake, Thus to distress your aunt: No Drury Lane for you to-day!' And while Papa said, 'Pooh, she may!' Mamma said, 'No, she sha'n't!'

Well, after many a sad reproach, They got into a hackney coach, And trotted down the street. I saw them go: one horse was blind, The tails of both hung down behind, Their shoes were on their feet.

The chaise in which poor brother Bill Used to be drawn to Pentonville Stood in the lumber-room: I wiped the dust from off the top, While Molly mopp'd it with a mop, And brush'd it with a broom.

My uncle's porter, Samuel Hughes, Came in at six to black the shoes, (I always talk to Sam:) So what does he, but takes, and drags Me in the chaise along the flags, And leaves me where I am.

My father's walls are made of brick, But not so tall and not so thick As these; and, goodness me! My father's beams are made of wood, But never, never half so good As those that now I see.

What a large floor! 'tis like a town! The carpet, when they lay it down, Won't hide it, I'll be bound; And there's a row of lamps!--my eye! How they do blaze! I wonder why They keep them on the ground.

At first I caught hold of the wing, And kept away; but Mr. Thing- umbob, the prompter man, Gave with his hand my chaise a shove, And said, 'Go on, my pretty love; 'Speak to 'em, little Nan.

'You've only got to curtsy, whisp- er, hold your chin up, laugh, and lisp, And then you're sure to take: I've known the day when brats, not quite Thirteen, got fifty pounds a-night;[7] Then why not Nancy Lake?'

But while I'm speaking, where's papa? And where's my aunt? and where's mamma? Where's Jack? O, there they sit! They smile, they nod; I'll go my ways, And order round poor Billy's chaise, To join them in the pit.

And now, good gentlefolks, I go To join mamma, and see the show; So, bidding you adieu, I curtsy, like a pretty miss, And if you'll blow to me a kiss, I'll blow a kiss to you. [_Blows a kiss, and exit._]

'The author does not, in this instance, attempt to copy any of the higher attributes of Mr. Wordsworth's poetry; but has succeeded perfectly in the imitation of his maukish affectations of childish simplicity and nursery stammering. We hope it will make him ashamed of his _Alice Fell_, and the greater part of his last volumes--of which it is by no means a parody, but a very fair; and indeed we think a flattering, imitation.'--_Edinburgh Review._

AN ADDRESS WITHOUT A PHŒNIX.

This was looked for at your hand, and this was balked. _What You Will._

What stately vision mocks my waking sense? Hence, dear delusion, sweet enchantment, hence! Ha! is it real?--can my doubts be vain? It is, it is, and Drury lives again! Around each grateful veteran attends, Eager to rush and gratulate his friends, Friends whose kind looks, retraced with proud delight, Endear the past, and make the future bright: Yes, generous patrons, your returning smile Blesses our toils, and consecrates our pile.

When last we met, Fate's unrelenting hand Already grasped the devastating brand; Slow crept the silent flame, ensnared its prize, Then burst resistless to the astonished skies. The glowing walls, disrobed of scenic pride, In trembling conflict stemmed the burning tide, Till crackling, blazing, rocking to its fall, Down rushed the thundering roof, and buried all!

Where late the sister Muses sweetly sung, And raptured thousands on their music hung, Where Wit and Wisdom shone, by Beauty graced, Sat lonely Silence, empress of the waste; And still had reigned--but he, whose voice can raise More magic wonders than Amphion's lays, Bade jarring bands with friendly zeal engage To rear the prostrate glories of the stage. Up leaped the Muses at the potent spell, And Drury's genius saw his temple swell; Worthy, we hope, the British Drama's cause, Worthy of British arts, and _your_ applause.

Guided by you, our earnest aims presume To renovate the Drama with the dome; The scenes of Shakespeare and our bards of old, With due observance splendidly unfold, Yet raise and foster with parental hand The living talent of our native land. O! may we still, to sense and nature true, Delight the many, nor offend the few. Though varying tastes our changeful Drama claim, Still be its moral tendency the same, To win by precept, by example warn, To brand the front of Vice with pointed scorn, And Virtue's smiling brows with votive wreaths adorn.

Sated with home, of wife, of children tired, The restless soul is driven abroad to roam;[10] Sated abroad, all seen, yet nought admired, The restless soul is driven to ramble home; Sated with both, beneath new Drury's dome The fiend Ennui awhile consents to pine, There growls, and curses, like a deadly Gnome, Scorning to view fantastic Columbine, Viewing with scorn and hate the nonsense of the Nine.

Ye reckless dupes, who hither wend your way To gaze on puppets in a painted dome, Pursuing pastimes glittering to betray, Like falling stars in life's eternal gloom, What seek ye here? Joy's evanescent bloom? Woe's me! the brightest wreaths she ever gave Are but as flowers that decorate a tomb. Man's heart, the mournful urn o'er which they wave, Is sacred to despair, its pedestal the grave.

Has life so little store of real woes, That here ye wend to taste fictitious grief? Or is it that from truth such anguish flows, Ye court the lying drama for relief? Long shall ye find the pang, the respite brief: Or if one tolerable page appears In folly's volume, 'tis the actor's leaf, Who dries his own by drawing others' tears, And, raising present mirth, makes glad his future years.

Albeit, how like young Betty doth he flee! Light as the mote that danceth in the beam, He liveth only in man's present e'e, His life a flash, his memory a dream, Oblivious down he drops in Lethe's stream. Yet what are they, the learned and the great? Awhile of longer wonderment the theme, Who shall presume to prophesy _their_ date, Where nought is certain, save the uncertainty of fate?

This goodly pile, upheaved by Wyatt's toil, Perchance than Holland's edifice[11] more fleet, Again red Lemnos' artisan may spoil; The fire-alarm and midnight drum may beat, And all be strewed y-smoking at your feet! Start ye? perchance Death's angel may be sent, Ere from the flaming temple ye retreat; And ye who met, on revel idlesse bent, May find, in pleasure's fane, your grave and monument.

Your debts mount high--ye plunge in deeper waste; The tradesman duns--no warning voice ye hear; The plaintiff sues--to public shows ye haste; The bailiff threats--ye feel no idle fear. Who can arrest your prodigal career? Who can keep down the levity of youth? What sound can startle age's stubborn ear? Who can redeem from wretchedness and ruth Men true to falsehood's voice, false to the voice of truth?

To thee, blest saint! who doffed thy skin to make The Smithfield rabble leap from theirs with joy, We dedicate the pile--arise! awake!-- Knock down the Muses, wit and sense destroy, Clear our new stage from reason's dull alloy, Charm hobbling age, and tickle capering youth With cleaver, marrow-bone, and Tunbridge toy; While, vibrating in unbelieving tooth,[12] Harps twang in Drury's walls, and make her boards a booth.

For what is Hamlet, but a hare in March? And what is Brutus, but a croaking owl? And what is Rolla? Cupid steeped in starch, Orlando's helmet in Augustine's cowl. Shakespeare, how true thine adage, 'fair is foul!' To him whose soul is with fruition fraught,-- The song of Braham is an Irish howl,-- Thinking is but an idle waste of thought, And nought is every thing, and every thing is nought.

Sons of Parnassus! whom I view above, Not laurel-crown'd, but clad in rusty black; Not spurring Pegasus through Tempè's grove, But pacing Grub-street on a jaded hack; What reams of foolscap, while your brains ye rack, Ye mar to make again! for sure, ere long, Condemn'd to tread the bard's time-sanction'd track, Ye all shall join the bailiff-haunted throng, And reproduce, in rags, the rags ye blot in song.

So fares the follower in the Muses' train; He toils to starve, and only lives in death; We slight him, till our patronage is vain, Then round his skeleton a garland wreathe, And o'er his bones an empty requiem breathe-- Oh! with what tragic horror would he start, (Could he be conjured from the grave beneath) To find the stage again a Thespian cart, And elephants and colts down-trampling Shakespeare's art.

Hence, pedant Nature! with thy Grecian rules! Centaurs (not fabulous) those rules efface; Back, sister Muses, to your native schools; Here booted grooms usurp Apollo's place. Hoofs shame the boards that Garrick used to grace, The play of limbs succeeds the play of wit, Man yields the drama to the Hou'yn'm race, His prompter spurs, his licenser the bit, The stage a stable-yard, a jockey-club the pit.

Is it for these ye rear this proud abode? Is it for these your superstition seeks To build a temple worthy of a god, To laud a monkey, or to worship leeks? Then be the stage, to recompense your freaks, A motley chaos, jumbling age and ranks, Where Punch, the lignum-vitæ Roscius, squeaks, And Wisdom weeps, and Folly plays her pranks, And moody Madness laughs and hugs the chain he clanks.

'The author has succeeded better in copying the moody and misanthropic sentiments of _Childe Harold_, than the nervous and impetuous diction in which his noble biographer has embodied them. The attempt, however, indicates very considerable power; and the flow of the verse and the construction of the poetical period are imitated with no ordinary skill.'--_Edinburgh Review._

SECRETARY OF THE MANAGING COMMITTEE OF DRURY-LANE PLAYHOUSE.

To the gewgaw fetters of _rhyme_ (invented by the monks to enslave the people) I have a rooted objection. I have therefore written an address for your theatre in plain, homespun, yeoman's _prose_; in the doing whereof hope I am swayed by nothing but an _independent_ wish to open the eyes of this gulled people, to prevent a repetition of the dramatic _bamboozling_ they have hitherto laboured under. If you like what I have done, and mean to make use of it, I don't want any such _aristocratic_ reward as a piece of plate with two griffins sprawling upon it, or a _dog_ and a _jackass_ fighting for a ha'p'worth of _gilt gingerbread_, or any such Bartholomew-fair nonsense. All I ask is, that the door-keepers of your playhouse may take all the _sets of my Register_ now on hand, and _force_ every body who enters your doors to buy one, giving afterwards a debtor and creditor account of what they have received, _post-paid_, and in due course remitting me the money and unsold Registers, _carriage-paid_.

----Rabidâ qui concitus irâ Implevit pariter ternis latratibus auras, Et sparsit virides spumis albentibus agros. OVID.

MOST THINKING PEOPLE,

When persons address an audience from the stage, it is usual, either in words or gesture, to say, 'Ladies and Gentlemen, your servant.' If I were base enough, mean enough, paltry enough, and _brute beast_ enough, to follow that fashion, I should tell two lies in a breath. In the first place, you are _not_ Ladies and Gentlemen, but I hope something better, that is to say, honest men and women; and in the next place, if you were ever so much ladies, and ever so much gentlemen, I am not, _nor ever will be_, your humble servant. You see me here, _most thinking people_, by mere chance. I have not been within the doors of a playhouse before for these ten years; nor, till that abominable custom of taking money at the doors is discontinued, will I ever sanction a theatre with my presence. The stage-door is the only gate of _freedom_ in the whole edifice, and through that I made my way from Bagshaw's[14] in Brydges Street, to accost you. Look about you. Are you not all comfortable? Nay, never slink, mun; speak out, if you are dissatisfied, and tell me so before I leave town. You are now, (thanks to _Mr. Whitbread_,) got into a large, comfortable house. Not into a _gimcrack palace_; not into a _Solomon's temple_; not into a frost-work of Brobdingnag filigree; but into a plain, honest, homely, industrious, wholesome, _brown brick playhouse_. You have been struggling for independence and elbow-room these three years; and who gave it you? Who helped you out of Lilliput? Who routed you from a rat-hole, five inches by four, to perch you in a palace? Again and again I answer, _Mr. Whitbread_. You might have sweltered in that place with the Greek name[15] till doomsday, and neither _Lord Castlereagh_, _Mr. Canning_, no, nor the _Marquess Wellesley_, would have turned a trowel to help you out! Remember that. Never forget that. Read it to your children, and to your children's children! And now, _most thinking people_, cast your eyes over my head to what the builder (I beg his pardon, the architect) calls the _proscenium_. No motto, no slang, no popish Latin, to keep the people in the dark. No _veluti in speculum_. Nothing in the dead languages, properly so called, for they ought to die, aye and be _damned_ to boot! The Covent Garden manager tried that, and a pretty business he made of it! When a man says _veluti in speculum_, he is called a man of letters. Very well, and is not a man who cries O. P. a man of letters too? You ran your O. P. against his _veluti in speculum_, and pray which beat? I prophesied that, though I never told any body. I take it for granted, that every intelligent man, woman, and child, to whom I address myself, has stood severally and respectively in Little Russell Street, and cast their, his, her, and its eyes on the outside of this building before they paid their money to view the inside. Look at the brick-work, _English Audience_! Look at the brick-work! All plain and smooth like a quakers' meeting. None of your Egyptian pyramids, to entomb subscribers' capitals. No overgrown colonnades of stone, like an alderman's gouty legs in white cotton stockings, fit only to use as rammers for paving Tottenham Court Road. This house is neither after the model of a temple in Athens, no, nor a _temple_ in _Moorfields_, but it is built to act English plays in; and, provided you have good scenery, dresses, and decorations, I daresay you wouldn't break your hearts if the outside were as plain as the pikestaff I used to carry when I was a sergeant. _Apropos_, as the French valets say, who cut their masters' throats[16]--_apropos_, a word about dresses. You must, many of you, have seen what I have read a description of, Kemble and Mrs. Siddons in Macbeth, with more gold and silver plastered on their doublets than would have kept an honest family in butcher's meat and flannel from year's end to year's end! I am informed, (now mind, I do not vouch for the fact,) but I am informed that all such extravagant idleness is to be done away with here. Lady Macbeth is to have a plain quilted petticoat, a cotton gown, and a mob cap (as the court parasites call it;--it will be well for them, if, one of these days, they don't wear a _mob cap_--I mean a _white cap_, with a _mob_ to look at them); and Macbeth is to appear in an honest yeoman's drab coat, and a pair of black calamanco breeches. Not _Sal_amanca; no, nor _Talavera_ neither, my most Noble Marquess; but plain, honest, black calamanco stuff breeches. This is right; this is as it should be. _Most thinking people_, I have heard you much abused. There is not a compound in the language but is strung fifty in a rope, like onions, by the Morning Post, and hurled in your teeth. You are called the mob; and when they have made you out to be the mob, you are called the _scum_ of the people, and the _dregs_ of the people. I should like to know how you can be both. Take a basin of broth--not _cheap soup, Mr. Wilberforce_--not soup for the poor, at a penny a quart, as your mixture of horses' legs, brick-dust, and old shoes, was denominated--but plain, wholesome, patriotic beef or mutton broth; take this, examine it, and you will find--mind, I don't vouch for the fact, but I am told--you will find the dregs at the bottom, and the scum at the top. I will endeavour to explain this to you: England is a large _earthenware pipkin_; John Bull is the _beef_ thrown into it; taxes are the _hot water_ he boils in; rotten boroughs are the _fuel_ that blazes under this same pipkin; parliament is the _ladle_ that stirs the hodge-podge, and sometimes----. But, hold! I don't wish to pay _Mr. Newman_[17] a second visit. I leave you better off than you have been this many a day: you have a good house over your head; you have beat the French in Spain; the harvest has turned out well; the comet keeps its distance;[18] and red slippers are hawked about in Constantinople for next to nothing; and for all this, _again and again_ I tell you, you are indebted to _Mr. Whitbread_!!!

Jam te juvaverit Viros relinquere, Doctæque conjugis Sinu quiescere. SIR T. MORE.

O why should our dull retrospective addresses[20] Fall damp as wet blankets on Drury Lane fire? Away with blue devils, away with distresses, And give the gay spirit to sparkling desire!

Let artists decide on the beauties of Drury, The richest to me is when woman is there; The question of houses I leave to the jury; The fairest to me is the house of the fair.

When woman's soft smile all our senses bewilders, And gilds, while it carves, her dear form on the heart, What need has New Drury of carvers and gilders? With Nature so bounteous, why call upon Art?

How well would our actors attend to their duties, Our house save in oil, and our authors in wit, In lieu of yon lamps, if a row of young beauties Glanced light from their eyes between us and the pit!