They were passed with the Duke of Northumberland, Jack Sheppard, Cranmer, some of the Gunpowder Conspirators, and my dear old friend George Cruikshank. It was a stirring period altogether, and we went with the times. I was as wild as the rest, and after having had a hand in the Fire of London (I helped James the Second to light Old St. Paul’s myself), I hired a hearse hack, and under the assumed name of Dick Turpin, rode to York in two hundred and seventy-six hours.
It was a daring feat, and coming, at the rate of two and sixpence an hour, to a pretty considerable sum, got me into such trouble that my friends determined to send me to Oxford, and entered me as an undergraduate at Auriol.
“ Here I let the reins go pretty freely. I lived like a Spendthrift, kept a hunter and frequently rode—yes, it was to Herne Bay and back, making heavy bets on each event. This got me into sad straits;
so, finding myself with scarcely a flitch of bacon to live on, ancl known unfavourably at most of the local billiard-rooms I frequented as ‘ Rookwood,’ I determined to make a plunge for it at any cost,— and without more ado, I married a Miser’s Daughter. That was my turning point. Old George was my best man, and I remember him slapping me familiarly on the back after the ceremony, and saying, ‘ W illiam, my boy, you might be let loose among the Lan
cashire Witches now, and you would conduct yourself like an Admirable Crichton.’
“ He was right. There were lots of money, and I bought Ovingdean Grange. The Vicar, the Rev. Mervyn Clitheroe, is my most intimate friend. I am honoured and respected. People point me out in St. James’s, and there’s always a knife and fork ready for me at Windsor Castle. You see, my friends,” he said, rising, with an agreeable self-complacency, “ I have some interesting materials for the autobiography 1 referred to the other night at Manchester.” We bow. “And now,” he adds, “ having greeted you as strangers, let me place your cards on my rack—the self-same instrument, the original one from the Tower, on which so many of my friends have been gibbeted.”
With a cheery farewell he shows us to the now glimmering street. The bloodhounds give a final spring, but in another minute two strangers, once more safe and sound, are to be seen winding their way slowly through the dusk to the neighbouring cab-stand. And so ends our interview with the Great Lancashire Novelist.
A DIP INTO ASIA.
The Volga river in length and breadth is the finest in Europe, but it is not a tourist’s river. You can float or steam down it for two or three thousand miles, if you are satisfied with sandbanks and slopes, which scarcely rise to the dignity of hills. A Volga steam
boat is a large and comfortable vessel, with a dining-saloon, sleeping cabins, a table d hote, and an upper and lower deck. The fore part of the boat is devoted to second and third class passengers, and the latter lie upon the lower deck in one closely packed heap, consisting of men, women, children, baskets, bedding, and tea-urns. Small rough seats and tables are fixed at the sides near the port-holes, on which the men drink tea, eat vegetable soup, and play at cards. Persians, Jews, Russians, Circassians, Tartars, Merchants, Peasants,
and others, form the living cargo, and the children amuse themselvesby climbing to the highest peak of bedding from which they can command a view of the engine-room. When they are tired of this they swarm on to the upper-deck, and little bare-legged, bare footed Tartar and Russian urchins, danoe freely over the sacred limits which separate the first from the lower class passengers. Russia, as I have said before, is a despotic country, ana the English, as I have said before,
have much to be thankful for. Travelling in Russia is a family ceremony. The activity of the children is fortunately not shared by the parents, who are kept quiet by that wonderful power of sleep which is a leading national characteristic.
In two days from Nishni you reaoh Samara, the head-quarters of Russian corn, and the /Esthetic sunflower. The Russians do not worship the sunflower, like a certain sect in England ; they grow it for seed, and nothing more. A Samara inhabitant will speculate as a grower of sunflowers in no higher spirit than a love for filthy lucre.
The wharves at Samara would be a disgrace to Khiva. A sloping desert of sand, mixed with decayed vegetable matter, and all kinds of muck, half covered with wooden sheas in every stage of ruin, that would hardly shelter a decent English pig, is all Samara has to show for its river-side market. Each stall-keeper has a family, who roll in the dust, and look on while the Samarese buy fruit, nuts, or muskmelons. And yet Samara is a wealthy town with ninety thousand inhabitants, and Russia has a great engineer like Todleben, and more than a million of soldiers doing worse than nothing !
A short distance outside Samara, on the road to Orenbourg, is a small ditch, which the Empress Catherine the Second, commonly called the Great Catherine, decided was the boundary between European Russia and Asia. Catherine was a great Empress, but a very small geographer. [*„* No space—more illumination from this “ flip ” next week. This 1 Dip ” is a Rush-ia light.—Ed.]
THE NIGHT-LIGHTS OF LONDON.
To judge Mr. G. R. Sims according to his Lights, we should say that his new melodrama has decidedly,thrown all recent productions
of the same class into the
shade. Of course, the author will follow up The Lights of London with The Heart of London and then The Lungs of London. “ The piece,” as a Lady next to us observed, “seems like a success; ” to which we immediately replied, Shakspearianly, “ Sims, Madam, nay tis.
I know not Sims,”—which is personally true, though we profess great admiration for his work.
The dialogue is excellent : rarely on stilts, never flat, and generally easy, epigrammatic, and, above all, perfectly natural.
Strange to sav of a genuinely successful melo
drama—and it thoroughly deserves its success—the
weakest part is the central sensation scene, which borders dangerously on the ludicrous in repre
sentation ; and, still stranger, the female in
terest of the story is so feeble, that, on calm con
sideration, the real heroine of the piece is the comic old woman,
played as only Mrs. Stephens can play such a part.
Bess Marks, intended for the heroine, is throughout fatigued, fainting, or half-dying, and therefore, of oourse, not much talk can be expected from her in these
conditions; and then she is perpetually being
carried about or embraced by Mr. Wilson Barrett, who is invariably either soothing her, or consoling her, or sending her off to sleep, or keeping her quiet in a general way, which is not conducive to much development of speech on the part of the unhappy Bess Marks, most sympa
thetically played by Miss Eastlake, who makes the most of her single opportunity of giving the villain a bit of her mind at the end of the piece.
As to the other girl, Hetty Preene, Miss
Emmeline Ormsby, she is very soon out of it altogether.
Mr. Wilson Barrett, as the unfortunate LLarold Armytage, enlists the sympathies of
the audience from first to last, never over- . doing it except once when, as the escaped convict, he insists on cuddling and mauling .karris, the itinerant Theatrical Manager,
who iudging from the lifelike portraiture of the character, as represented by Mr. George Barrett, would have speedily resented such liberties, and have knocked the convict down then and there.
This cuddling of the Showman suggested, naturally, that “Cuddling’s the man, not Short ”
—and the shorter this becomes the better it must be artistically. But these are mere trifling details, and could not be insisted upon for a moment, were not all the rest so exceptionally good.
The villain’s part, though conoeived, as is the story itself for the matter of that, on old lines, is sensibly written; every word is true to the character. Clifford Armytage, like the Prince of Darkness himself, is a gentleman to all outward appearance, a sharp, cynical, reparteeish, swellish, deep double-dyed scoun
drel—just, in fact, the sort of blackguard we should, like to be if we took up that line pro
fessionally. The other villain, Seth Preene, is
well played by Mr. Walter Speakman.
But there is one touch, which is worth the whole piece put together —and very well put together it is—when in Act III. Mr. Wilson Barrett, the innocent escaped convict, finds his wife in Jarvis s
Comfortable Sensation Scene ; or, “ Letting him down easy.” N.B.—When the victim drops into the Canal, salt is thrown up to represent the effect of the splash. ’Salt and battery.
The Real Heroine of
the Drama.
ThoVillain. “That’s the sort of man I am.”
It was a daring feat, and coming, at the rate of two and sixpence an hour, to a pretty considerable sum, got me into such trouble that my friends determined to send me to Oxford, and entered me as an undergraduate at Auriol.
“ Here I let the reins go pretty freely. I lived like a Spendthrift, kept a hunter and frequently rode—yes, it was to Herne Bay and back, making heavy bets on each event. This got me into sad straits;
so, finding myself with scarcely a flitch of bacon to live on, ancl known unfavourably at most of the local billiard-rooms I frequented as ‘ Rookwood,’ I determined to make a plunge for it at any cost,— and without more ado, I married a Miser’s Daughter. That was my turning point. Old George was my best man, and I remember him slapping me familiarly on the back after the ceremony, and saying, ‘ W illiam, my boy, you might be let loose among the Lan
cashire Witches now, and you would conduct yourself like an Admirable Crichton.’
“ He was right. There were lots of money, and I bought Ovingdean Grange. The Vicar, the Rev. Mervyn Clitheroe, is my most intimate friend. I am honoured and respected. People point me out in St. James’s, and there’s always a knife and fork ready for me at Windsor Castle. You see, my friends,” he said, rising, with an agreeable self-complacency, “ I have some interesting materials for the autobiography 1 referred to the other night at Manchester.” We bow. “And now,” he adds, “ having greeted you as strangers, let me place your cards on my rack—the self-same instrument, the original one from the Tower, on which so many of my friends have been gibbeted.”
With a cheery farewell he shows us to the now glimmering street. The bloodhounds give a final spring, but in another minute two strangers, once more safe and sound, are to be seen winding their way slowly through the dusk to the neighbouring cab-stand. And so ends our interview with the Great Lancashire Novelist.
A DIP INTO ASIA.
The Volga river in length and breadth is the finest in Europe, but it is not a tourist’s river. You can float or steam down it for two or three thousand miles, if you are satisfied with sandbanks and slopes, which scarcely rise to the dignity of hills. A Volga steam
boat is a large and comfortable vessel, with a dining-saloon, sleeping cabins, a table d hote, and an upper and lower deck. The fore part of the boat is devoted to second and third class passengers, and the latter lie upon the lower deck in one closely packed heap, consisting of men, women, children, baskets, bedding, and tea-urns. Small rough seats and tables are fixed at the sides near the port-holes, on which the men drink tea, eat vegetable soup, and play at cards. Persians, Jews, Russians, Circassians, Tartars, Merchants, Peasants,
and others, form the living cargo, and the children amuse themselvesby climbing to the highest peak of bedding from which they can command a view of the engine-room. When they are tired of this they swarm on to the upper-deck, and little bare-legged, bare footed Tartar and Russian urchins, danoe freely over the sacred limits which separate the first from the lower class passengers. Russia, as I have said before, is a despotic country, ana the English, as I have said before,
have much to be thankful for. Travelling in Russia is a family ceremony. The activity of the children is fortunately not shared by the parents, who are kept quiet by that wonderful power of sleep which is a leading national characteristic.
In two days from Nishni you reaoh Samara, the head-quarters of Russian corn, and the /Esthetic sunflower. The Russians do not worship the sunflower, like a certain sect in England ; they grow it for seed, and nothing more. A Samara inhabitant will speculate as a grower of sunflowers in no higher spirit than a love for filthy lucre.
The wharves at Samara would be a disgrace to Khiva. A sloping desert of sand, mixed with decayed vegetable matter, and all kinds of muck, half covered with wooden sheas in every stage of ruin, that would hardly shelter a decent English pig, is all Samara has to show for its river-side market. Each stall-keeper has a family, who roll in the dust, and look on while the Samarese buy fruit, nuts, or muskmelons. And yet Samara is a wealthy town with ninety thousand inhabitants, and Russia has a great engineer like Todleben, and more than a million of soldiers doing worse than nothing !
A short distance outside Samara, on the road to Orenbourg, is a small ditch, which the Empress Catherine the Second, commonly called the Great Catherine, decided was the boundary between European Russia and Asia. Catherine was a great Empress, but a very small geographer. [*„* No space—more illumination from this “ flip ” next week. This 1 Dip ” is a Rush-ia light.—Ed.]
THE NIGHT-LIGHTS OF LONDON.
To judge Mr. G. R. Sims according to his Lights, we should say that his new melodrama has decidedly,thrown all recent productions
of the same class into the
shade. Of course, the author will follow up The Lights of London with The Heart of London and then The Lungs of London. “ The piece,” as a Lady next to us observed, “seems like a success; ” to which we immediately replied, Shakspearianly, “ Sims, Madam, nay tis.
I know not Sims,”—which is personally true, though we profess great admiration for his work.
The dialogue is excellent : rarely on stilts, never flat, and generally easy, epigrammatic, and, above all, perfectly natural.
Strange to sav of a genuinely successful melo
drama—and it thoroughly deserves its success—the
weakest part is the central sensation scene, which borders dangerously on the ludicrous in repre
sentation ; and, still stranger, the female in
terest of the story is so feeble, that, on calm con
sideration, the real heroine of the piece is the comic old woman,
played as only Mrs. Stephens can play such a part.
Bess Marks, intended for the heroine, is throughout fatigued, fainting, or half-dying, and therefore, of oourse, not much talk can be expected from her in these
conditions; and then she is perpetually being
carried about or embraced by Mr. Wilson Barrett, who is invariably either soothing her, or consoling her, or sending her off to sleep, or keeping her quiet in a general way, which is not conducive to much development of speech on the part of the unhappy Bess Marks, most sympa
thetically played by Miss Eastlake, who makes the most of her single opportunity of giving the villain a bit of her mind at the end of the piece.
As to the other girl, Hetty Preene, Miss
Emmeline Ormsby, she is very soon out of it altogether.
Mr. Wilson Barrett, as the unfortunate LLarold Armytage, enlists the sympathies of
the audience from first to last, never over- . doing it except once when, as the escaped convict, he insists on cuddling and mauling .karris, the itinerant Theatrical Manager,
who iudging from the lifelike portraiture of the character, as represented by Mr. George Barrett, would have speedily resented such liberties, and have knocked the convict down then and there.
This cuddling of the Showman suggested, naturally, that “Cuddling’s the man, not Short ”
—and the shorter this becomes the better it must be artistically. But these are mere trifling details, and could not be insisted upon for a moment, were not all the rest so exceptionally good.
The villain’s part, though conoeived, as is the story itself for the matter of that, on old lines, is sensibly written; every word is true to the character. Clifford Armytage, like the Prince of Darkness himself, is a gentleman to all outward appearance, a sharp, cynical, reparteeish, swellish, deep double-dyed scoun
drel—just, in fact, the sort of blackguard we should, like to be if we took up that line pro
fessionally. The other villain, Seth Preene, is
well played by Mr. Walter Speakman.
But there is one touch, which is worth the whole piece put together —and very well put together it is—when in Act III. Mr. Wilson Barrett, the innocent escaped convict, finds his wife in Jarvis s
Comfortable Sensation Scene ; or, “ Letting him down easy.” N.B.—When the victim drops into the Canal, salt is thrown up to represent the effect of the splash. ’Salt and battery.
The Real Heroine of
the Drama.
ThoVillain. “That’s the sort of man I am.”