Part 4

remark: ‘It is very desirable that the power, strength, and union of the Opposition should appear considerable while out of office, in order that if ever they should come in it may be plain that they have an existence of their own, and are not the mere creatures of the Crown.’ But Fox breaks suddenly away from subjects of crafty statesmanship, with this sentence: ‘Everybody here is mad about this Boy Actor, even Uncle Dick is full of astonishment and admiration. We go to town to-morrow to see him, and from what I have heard, I own I shall be disappointed if he is not a prodigy.’

On the same day Fox wrote a letter from St. Anne’s Hill to the Hon. C. Grey (the Lord Grey of the Reform Bill). It is bristling with ‘politicks,’ but between reference to party battles and remarks on Burke, the statesman says: ‘Everybody is mad about this Young Roscius, and we go to town to-morrow to see him. The accounts of him seem incredible; but the opinion of him is nearly unanimous, and Fitzpatrick, who went strongly prepossessed against him, was perfectly astonished and full of admiration.’

We do not find any letter of Fox’s extant to tell us his opinion of the ‘tenth wonder.’ We can go with him to the play, nevertheless. ‘While young Betty was in all his glory,’ says Samuel Rogers, in his ‘Table Talk,’ ‘I went with Fox and Mrs. Fox, after dining with them in Arlington Street, to see him act Hamlet; and, during the play scene, Fox, to my infinite surprise, said, “This is finer than Garrick!”’ Fox would not have said so if he had not thought so. He did not say as much to Master Betty, but he best proved his sympathy by sitting with and reading to him passages from the great dramatists, mingled with excellent counsel.

Windham, the famous statesman, who as much loved to see a pugilistic fight as Fox did to throw double sixes, and to whom a stroll in Leicester Fields was as agreeable as an hour with an Italian poet was to Fox--Windham hurried through the Fields to Covent Garden. His diary for the year 1804 is lost; but in that for 1805 we come upon his opinion of the attractive player, after visits in both years. On January 31, 1805, there is this entry in his diary;--‘Went, according to arrangement, with Elliot and Grenville to play; Master Betty in Frederick’ (‘Lovers’ Vows’). ‘Lord Spencer, who had been shooting at Osterley, came afterwards. Liked Master B. better than before, but still inclined to my former opinion; his action certainly very graceful, except now and then that he is a little tottering on his legs, and his recitation just, but his countenance not expressive; his voice neither powerful nor pleasing.’

The criticisms of actors were generally less favourable. Kemble was ‘riveted,’ we are told, by the acting of Master Betty; but he was contemptuously silent. Mrs. Siddons, according to Campbell, ‘never concealed her disgust at the popular infatuation.’ At the end of the play Lord Abercorn came into her box and told her that that boy, Betty, would eclipse everything which had been called acting, in England. ‘My Lord,’ she answered, ‘he is a very clever, pretty boy; but nothing more.’ Mrs. Siddons, however, was meanly jealous of all that stood between her and the public. When Mrs. Siddons was young, she was jealous of grand old Mrs. Crawford. When Mrs. Siddons was old, and had retired, she was jealous of young Miss O’Neill. She querulously said that the public were fond of setting up new idols in order to annoy their former favourites. George Frederick Cooke who had played Glenalvon to Master Betty’s Norval--played it finely too, at his very best--and could not crush the boy, after whom everybody was repeating the line he made so famous,

The blood of Douglas can protect itself!

--Cooke alluded to him in his diary, for 1811, thus: ‘I was visited by Master Payne, the American Young Roscius; I thought him a polite, sensible youth, and the reverse of our Young Roscius.’ This was an ebullition of irritability. Even those who could not praise Roscius as a tenth wonder, acknowledged his courtesy and were struck by his good common sense. Boaden, who makes the singular remark that ‘all the favouritism, and more than the innocence, of former patronesses was lavished on him,’ also tells us more intelligibly, that Master Betty ‘never lost the genuine modesty of his carriage; and his temper, at least, was as steady as his diligence.’ One actor said, ‘Among clever boys he would have been a Triton among minnows;’ but Mrs. Inchbald remarked, ‘Had I never seen boys act, I might have thought him extraordinary.’ ‘Baby-faced child!’ said Campbell. ‘Handsome face! graceful figure! marvellous power!’ is the testimony of Mrs. Mathews. The most unbiassed judgment I can find is Miss Seward’s, who wrote thus of him in 1804, after seeing him as Osman in ‘Zara’: ‘It could not have been conceived or represented with more grace, sensibility, and fire, though he is veritably an effeminate boy of thirteen; but his features are cast in a diminutive mould, particularly his nose and mouth. This circumstance must at every period of life be injurious to stage effect; nor do I think his ear for blank verse faultless. Like Cooke, he never fails to give the passions their whole force, by gesture and action natural and just; but he does not do equal justice to the harmony. It is, I think, superfluous to look forward to the mature fruit of this luxuriant blossom.’ Miss Seward was right; but she was less correct in her prophecy, ‘He will not live to bear it. Energies various and violent will blast in no short time the vital powers, evidently delicate.’ He survived this prophecy just seventy years! One other opinion of him I cannot forbear adding. It is Elliston’s, and it is in the very loftiest of Robert William’s manner, who was born a little more than one hundred years ago! ‘Sir, my opinion of the young gentleman’s talents will never transpire during my life. I have written my convictions down. They have been attested by competent witnesses, and sealed and deposited in the iron safe at my banker’s, to be drawn forth and opened, with other important documents, at my death. The world will then know what Mr. Elliston thought of Master Betty!’

The Young Roscius withdrew from the stage and entered Christ’s College, Cambridge. He there enjoyed quiet study and luxurious seclusion. Meanwhile that once boy with the flashing eyes, Edmund Kean, had got a modest post at the Haymarket, where he played Rosencrantz to Mr. Rae’s Hamlet. He had also struggled his way to Belfast, and had acted Osman to Mrs. Siddons’ Zara. ‘He plays well, very well,’ said the lady: ‘but there is too little of him to make a great actor.’ Edmund, too, had married ‘Mary Chambers,’ at Stroud, and Mr. Beverley had turned the young couple out of his company, ‘to teach them not to do it again!’ In 1812, ‘Mr. Betty,’ come to man’s estate, returned to the stage, at Bath. A few months previously Mr. and Mrs. Kean were wandering from town to town. In rooms, to which the public were invited by written bills, in Kean’s hand, they recited scenes from plays and sang duets; and _he_ trilled songs, spoke soliloquies, danced hornpipes, and gave imitations!--and starved, and hoped--and would by no means despair.

Mr. Betty’s second career lasted from 1812 to 1824, when he made his last bow at Southampton, as the Earl of Warwick. Within the above period he acted at Covent Garden, in 1812 and 1813. He proved to be a highly ‘respectable’ actor; but the phenomenon no longer existed. His last performance in London was in June 1813, when he played ‘Richard III.’ and ‘Tristram Fickle’ for his benefit. In the following January Edmund Kean, three years his senior, took the town by storm in Shylock, and made his conquest good by his incomparable Richard. The genius of Mr. Betty left him with his youth. Edmund Kean drowned his genius in wine and rioting before his manhood was matured. Forty-eight years have elapsed since he was carried to his grave in Richmond churchyard. Honoured and regretted, all that was mortal of the once highly-gifted boy, who lived to be a venerable and much-loved old man, ‘fourscore years and upwards,’ was borne to his last resting-place in the cemetery at Highgate. _Requiescat in pace!_

_CHARLES YOUNG AND HIS TIMES._

Charles Mayne Young, one of the last of the school of noble actors, has found a biographer in his son, the Rev. Julian Young, Rector of Ilmington. Here we have stage and pulpit in happy and not unusual propinquity. There was a time when the clergy had the drama entirely to themselves; they were actors, authors, and managers. The earliest of them all retired to the monastery of St. Alban, after his theatre at Dunstable had been burnt down, at the close of a squib-and-rocket sort of drama on the subject of St. Theresa. At the Reformation the stage became secularised, the old moralities died out, and the new men and pieces were denounced as wicked by the ‘unco righteous’ among their dramatic clerical predecessors. Nevertheless, the oldest comedy of worldly manners we possess--‘Ralph Roister Doister’--was the work of the Rev. Dr. Nicholas Udall, in 1540. During the three centuries and nearly a half which have elapsed since that time, clergymen have ranked among the best writers for the stage. The two most successful tragedies of the last century were the Rev. Dr. Young’s ‘Revenge,’ and the Rev. J. Home’s ‘Douglas.’ In the present century few comedies have made such a sensation as the Rev. Dr. Croly’s ‘Pride shall have a Fall,’ but the sensation was temporary, the comedy only illustrating local and contemporary incidents.

A dozen other ‘Reverends’ might be cited who have more or less adorned dramatic literature, and there are many instances of dramatic artists whose sons or less near kinsmen having taken orders in the Church. When Sutton, in the pulpit of St. Mary Overy, A.D. 1616, denounced the stage, Nathaniel Field, the eminent actor, published a letter to the preacher, in which Field said that in the player’s trade there were corruptions as there were in all others; he implied, as Overbury implied, that the actor was not to be judged by the dross of the craft, but by the purer metal. Field anticipated Fielding’s Newgate Chaplain, who upheld ‘Punch’ on the same ground that the comedian upheld the stage--that it was nowhere spoken against in Scripture! The year 1616 was the year in which Shakespeare died. It is commonly said that the players of Shakespeare’s time were of inferior birth and culture, but Shakespeare himself was of a well-conditioned family, and this Nathaniel Field who stood up for the honour of the stage against the censure of the pulpit, had for brother that Rev. Theophilus Field who was successively Bishop of Llandaff, St. David’s, and Hereford. Charles Young was not the only actor of his day who gave a son to the Church. His old stage-manager at Bath, Mr. Charlton, saw not only his son but his grandsons usefully employed in the more serious vocation. As for sons of actors at the universities, they have seldom been wanting, from William Hemming (son of John Hemming, the actor, and joint-editor with Condell of the folio edition of Shakespeare’s Works), who took his degree at Oxford in 1628, down to Julian Charles Young, son of the great tragedian, who took his degree in the same university two centuries later; or, to be precise, A.D. 1827.

Charles Mayne Young, who owed his second name to the circumstance of his descent from the regicide who was so called, was born in Fenchurch Street, in 1777. His father was an able surgeon and a reckless spendthrift. Before the household fell into ruin, Charles Young had passed a holiday year, partly at the Court of Copenhagen. He had seen a boy with flashing eyes play bits from Shakespeare before the guests at his father’s table--a strolling, fantastically-dressed, intellectual boy, whose name was Edmund Kean. Further, Charles Young saw and appreciated, at the age of twelve, Mrs. Siddons as the mother of Coriolanus. He also passed through Eton and Merchant Taylors’. When the surgeon’s household was broken up, and Young and his two brothers took their ill-used mother to their own keeping, they adopted various courses for her and their own support, and all of them succeeded. Charles Young, after passing a restless novitiate in a merchant’s office (the more restless, probably, as he thought of two personages--the bright, gipsy-looking boy who had acted in his father’s dining-room, and the Volumnia of Mrs. Siddons, as she triumphed in the tragedy of Coriolanus), went upon the stage, triumphed in his turn, and assumed the sole guardianship and support of the mother he loved.

Young’s father was a remarkably detestable person. He never seems to have forgiven his sons for the affection which they manifested towards their mother. After the separation of the parents, George Young, the eldest son, was in a stage-coach going to Hackney; on the road, a stranger got in, took the only vacant seat, and, on seeing George Young opposite to him, struck him a violent blow in the face. George quietly called to the coachman to stop, and without exchanging a word with the stranger, got out, to the amazement of the other passengers. But, as he closed the door, he looked in and simply said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, that is my father!’ In 1807, when Charles Young made his first appearance in London, at the Haymarket, as Hamlet, his father sat ensconced in a corner of the house, and hissed him! Neither the blow nor the hiss did more than momentarily wound the feelings of the sons.

Before Young came up to London, he had seen some of the sunshine and some of the bitterness of life. He married the young, beautiful, and noble woman and actress, Julia Grimani. They had a brief, joyous, married time of little more than a year, when the birth of a son was the death of the mother. For the half-century that Young survived her no blandishment of woman ever led him to be untrue to her memory. To look with tears on her miniature-portrait, to touch tenderly some clustered locks of her hair, to murmur some affectionate word of praise, and, finally, to thank God that he should soon be with her, showed how young heart-feelings had survived in old heart-memories.

Charles Young adorned the English stage from 1807 to 1832. Because he acted with the Kembles he is sometimes described as being of the Kemble school. In a great theatre the leading player is often imitated throughout the house. There was a time when everybody employed at Drury Lane seemed a double of Mr. Macready. Charles Young, however, was an original actor. It took him but five years to show that he was equal in some characters to John Kemble himself. This was seen in 1812, in his Cassius to Kemble’s Brutus. On that occasion Terry is said to have been the Casca--a part which was really played by Fawcett. About ten years later, Young left the Covent Garden company and 25_l._ a week, for Drury Lane and 50_l._ a night, to play in the same pieces with Kean. The salary proved that the manager thought him equal in attractiveness to Kean; and Kean was, undoubtedly, somewhat afraid of him. Young’s secession was as great a loss to the company he had been

## acting with, as Compton’s has been to the Haymarket company. In both

cases, a perfect artist withdrew from the brotherhood.

Young was fifteen years upon the London stage before he could free himself from nervousness--nervousness, not merely like that of Mrs. Siddons, before going on, but when fairly in face of the audience. In 1826, he told Moore, at a dinner of the Anacreontics, that any close observer of his acting must have been conscious of a great improvement therein, dating from the previous four years. That is to say, dating from the time when he first played in the same piece with Edmund Kean. The encounter with that great master of his art seems to have braced Young’s nerves. Kean could not extinguish him as he extinguished Booth when those two acted together in the same play. Edmund, who spoke of Macready as ‘a player,’ acknowledged Young to be ‘an actor.’ Kean confessed Young’s superiority in Iago, and he could not bear to think of playing either that character or Pierre after him. Edmund believed in the greater merit of his own Othello. Young allowed that Kean had genius, but he was not enthusiastic in his praise; and Edmund, whose voice in tender passages was exquisite music, referred to the d----d musical voice of Young; and in his irritable moments spake of him as ‘that Jesuit!’

The greatest of Young’s original characters was his Rienzi. In Miss Mitford’s tragedy, Young pronounced ‘Rome’ _Room_. Many old play-goers can recollect how ill the word fell from his musical lips. John Kemble would never allow an actor in his company to give other utterance to the monosyllable. It was a part of the vicious and fantastic utterances of the Kemble family. Leigh Hunt has furnished a long list of them. Shakespeare, indeed, has ‘Now it is Rome indeed, and room enough,’ as Cassius says. But in ‘Henry VI.,’ when Beaufort exclaims, ‘Rome shall remedy this!’ Warwick replies, ‘_Roam_ thither, then!’ The latter jingle is far more common than the former. We agree with Genest, ‘Let the advocates for _Room_ be consistent. If the city is _Room_, the citizens are certainly _Roomans_.’ They who would have any idea how John Kemble mutilated the pronunciation of the English language on the stage, have only to consult the appendix to Leigh Hunt’s ‘Critical Essays on the Performers of the London Theatres.’ Such pronunciation seems now more appropriate to burlesque than to Shakespeare.

When the idea was first started of raising a statue in honour of Kemble, Talma wrote to ‘mon cher Young,’ expressing his wish to be among the subscribers. ‘In that idea I recognise your countrymen,’ said Talma. ‘I shall be too fortunate here if the priests leave me a grave in my own garden.’ The Comte de Soligny, or the author who wrote under that name, justly said in his ‘Letters on England,’ that Young was unlike any actor on the stage. His ornamental style had neither model nor imitators. ‘I cannot help thinking,’ writes the Count, ‘what a sensation Young would have created had he belonged to the French instead of the English stage. With a voice almost as rich, powerful, and sonorous as that of Talma--action more free, flowing, graceful, and various; a more expressive face, and a better person--he would have been hardly second in favour and attraction to that grandest of living actors. As it is, he admirably fills up that place on the English stage which would have been a blank without him.’ This is well and truly said, and it is applicable to ‘Gentleman Young’ throughout his whole career--a period during which he played a vast variety of characters, from Hamlet to Captain Macheath. He was not one of those players who were always in character. Between the scenes of his most serious parts he would keep the green-room merry with his stories, and be serious again as soon as his part required him. Young’s modest farewell to the stage reminds us of Garrick’s. The latter took place on June 10, 1776. The play was ‘The Wonder,’ Don Felix by Garrick; with ‘The Waterman.’ The bill is simply headed, ‘The last time of the company’s performing this season,’ and it concludes with these words: ‘The profits of this night being appropriated to the benefit of the Theatrical Fund, the Usual Address upon that Occasion Will be spoken by Mr. Garrick before the Play.’ The bill is now before us, and not a word in it refers to the circumstance that it was the last night that Garrick would ever act, and that he would take final leave after the play. All the world was supposed to know it. The only intimation that something unusual was on foot is contained in the words, ‘Ladies are desired to send their servants a little after 5, to keep places, to prevent confusion.’ Garrick’s farewell speech is stereotyped in all dramatic memories. His letter to Clutterbuck in the previous January is not so familiar. He says, ‘I have at last slipt my theatrical shell, and shall be as fine and free a gentleman as you should wish to see upon the South or North Parade of Bath. I have sold my moiety of patent, &c., for 35,000_l._, to Messrs. Dr. Ford, Ewart, Sheridan, and Linley.... I grow somewhat older, though I never played better in all my life, and am resolved not to remain upon the stage to be pitied instead of applauded!’ Garrick was sixty years of age when he left the stage. Young was five years less. In his modest farewell speech, after the curtain had descended on his Hamlet, he said, ‘It has been asked why I retire from the stage while still in possession of whatever qualifications I could ever pretend to unimpaired. I will give you my _motives_, although I do not know you will accept them as _reasons_--but reason and feeling are not always cater-cousins. I feel then the toil and excitement of my calling weigh more heavily upon me than formerly; and, if my qualifications are unimpaired, so I would have them remain in your estimate.... I am loth to remain before my patrons until I have nothing better to present them than tarnished metal.’ Among Young’s after-enjoyments was that of music. We well remember his always early presence in the front row of the pit at the old Opera House, and the friendly greetings that used to be exchanged between him and Mori, Nicholson, Linley, Dragonetti, and other great instrumentalists, as they made their appearance in the orchestra.

_Some_ theatrical impulses never abandoned him. During his retirement at Brighton, he was a constant attendant on the ministry of Mr. Sortain. ‘Mr. Bernal Osborne told me he was one day shown into the same pew with my father, whom he knew. He was struck with his devotional manner during the prayers and by his rapt attention during the sermon. But he found himself unable to maintain his gravity when, as the preacher paused to take breath after a long and eloquent outburst, the habits of the actor’s former life betrayed themselves, and he uttered in a deep undertone, the old familiar “_Bravo!_”’ As a sample of his cheerfulness of character, we may quote what Mr. Cole says of Young, in the life of Charles Kean:--‘Not long before he left London for his final residence at Brighton, he called, with one of his grandsons, to see the writer of these pages, who had long enjoyed his personal friendship, and who happened at the moment to be at dinner with his family. “Tell them,” he said to the servant, “not to hurry; but when they are at leisure, there are two little boys waiting to see them.”’