he came down the stairs in that prodigious hurry which must attend a man overwhelmed with business, and rising late. He saw everything with a single glance, and apologised for neglect in a way quite irresistible. The incumbrances of his fortune, therefore, hardly seemed to adhere to him:

"But like the dewdrops on the lion's mane
Were shook to air."

When he got fairly abroad Richardson and he passed their time together. Sluggish and inert, however, as Richardson certainly was, he acted as a sort of ballast to his friend's vessel. If anything was really pressing Richardson would "speak to Sheridan about it;" and, if any man prevailed upon him, it was certainly this fidus Achates. He felt the loss of Richardson so as to fall into an agony of tears, and settled that he would go down to Egham and attend this dear friend's funeral. His attention to either the dead or the living was through his existence always too late. He arrived at the grave just in time to see the clergyman turning away. The name of Sheridan, however, softened the rector, and the close of the service was repeated in his presence; so that he might say,

with truth, that he had heard the words of peace and rest breathed over the remains of poor Richardson. After the interment, said my friend Taylor, who was there, the mourners dined together at the inn, and no stinted libation was poured to the memory of the departed. Wine is apt to inspire magnificence and warm our imagination beyond the sense of impediments. Sheridan projected a mausoleum to his friend, worthy the attention of John Soane, who excels all men in the poetry of his art, and Doctor Combe, the mineralogist, had some specimens of stone which would be the happiest materials for such an architect to Sheridan pledged himself to compose a suitable inscription which should be a model for future encomiasts, true and yet striking.

use.

"In funeral song, they can't equal my tone,

And where Pope has miscarried, I triumph alone."

But mausoleum, though a word of "exceeding good command," as our friend Bardolph expresses himself, cannot, like the lyre of Amphion, dispose the most precious stones, without the modern cement of money; though Sheridan had erected his theatre, it is true, almost in the style of the walls of Thebes.

"Saxa movere sono testudinis, et prece blandâ,
Ducere quò vellet."

- Hor. de Arte Poet., v. 395.

Drury Lane received one capital accession in the changes consequent upon the desertion of the Kembles-Irish Johnstone, an actor of great value, chose to be at the opposite house. Harry Johnston, too, and his wife were now engaged at Drury, and they were, as melodramatists, of much consequence. As young Norval, Johnston had been long admired in the country of Home. In spectacle he was first-rate.

The union of Harris and Kemble was a thing at which all men wondered. Mr. Kemble made his first appearance in his new mansion on the 24th of September, in the character of Hamlet: Harris paid his new partner the compliment of coming down to the theatre to see him act. Reynolds told me he was so little gratified that he said, upon leaving his box: "My God! and is this all my partner can do?" We may be sure such a thing was not lost in a theatre, where alone the full perception can be had of the meaning of the phrase applied to that greatest of managers, Cleopatra, whose gentlewomen (ay, and gentlemen, too)

“Tended her i' th' eyes,

And made their bends adornings."

The

Every look, every word of a manager is watched incessantly in a playhouse; and the company looked upon Kemble as a man who came to break their former system to pieces, and who was little disposed to value talents that, however successful, combined so ill with his own. Lewis, the former manager, remained the first actor in comedy; but he necessarily depended upon the novelty which the established writers of the house annually supplied; for all these Kemble entertained a sovereign contempt, if he thought at all about them. good old comedies he conceived quite sufficient to mix up with the long list of tragedies essential to his sister and himself. Lewis was excessively popular in the theatre: he could not always please, but he got through the duty of stage-manager with urbanity and pleasantry; he lived always close to the theatre, his habits were regular, he was always cool and efficient, and to all connected with the theatre, so intimately associated, that they were covered with gloom and apprehension by the change. Kemble had long enjoyed the reputation of being a scholar, and of being pedantic in scholarship: he was accused of playing the com

mentator, where it was of little moment, and of living upon points and pauses. It is astonishing what hatred was worked up against him, and among other absurdities, those who disliked him gifted him with black-letter tendencies, which most certainly he never had, though some friend on such a presumption gave him a Ms. of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," which it was supposed had been the favourite volume of his own Hotspur, and which he read with difficulty I know, and I am confident never read throughout. The old plays of his country he collected, because Mr. Garrick had done so before him; and besides that he thought there should be, in some library at hand, every play that could by possibility be used, that if any impositions were attempted, their source might be pointed out. If there was some ostentation in all this, it is surely a natural foible in any actor to possess the materials of his art. His plays cost him many thousand pounds, and were uniformly bound together in several hundred volumes of the quarto shape. We may be sure as to Shakespeare, the god of his idolatry, he had everything that could be got for money. He now set about revising that author's plays for his present theatre, and published them as he proceeded, in a full octavo