Their Majesties' Servants (Volume 3 of 3)

escent. His father, a man of independent means, taught him fencing and elocution, and was

of Elvira, in "Pizarro." Ho was then ten years old; was a boy with a will and decision of character; and, in his twelfth year, he made his first ap

darling." In the Irish capital, he acted Douglas, Frederick, Prince Arthur, Romeo, Tancred, and Hamlet. As he is said to have learned and played th

ent on the Irish playbill which invited the public to go and see Master Betty, and advised them to get home early, if they would not be taken for tra

knee. The popular acclaim wafted him to Scotland. In Glasgow, there was one individual who was not mad, and would c

tation of his own "Douglas," blubbering in the boxes,[79] and protesting that never till then had young Norval been acted as he had conceived it! And he had seen West Digges, the original, in Ed

) played mother to him one night, and maid beloved the next; and at the close of a dozen performances, the Infant Roscius was celebra

impatient public from Doncaster races to Sheffield, where crowds of amateurs from London fought with the country-folk

ure form Apol

am to France, t

wice in the same day, and netted about ￡500 a week! Royal dukes expressed their delight in him, grateful managers loaded him with silver cups, and John Kemble wrote to M

boxes were occupied almost the whole night in fanning the gentlemen who were beneath them in the pit.... Upwards of twenty gentlemen, who had fainted, were dragged up into the boxes.... Several more raised their hands as if in the act of supplication for mercy and pity." As for the play, "Barbarossa," the sensible public would have none of it before the scene in the second act, in which Selim (Master Betty) first makes his appearance. When that arrived, he was not disturbed by the uproar of applause which welcomed him; and he answered the universal expectation. "Whenever he wished to produce a great effect he never failed." He was found to be "a pe

ith their new "servant;" royalty received him in its London palace, and to the Count d'Artois (future King of France) and an au

man Smith," the original Charles Surface, came up from Bury St. Edmunds, and presented him with a seal bearing the likeness of Garrick, and which Garrick, in his last illness, had c

ial distress, the threats of invasion, war abroad and sedition at home, and evinced such painful

hat on one night, having to play Hamlet, the House of Commons, on a motion by Pitt, adjourned, and went down to the theatre to see him! This flattery from the whole Senate was capped by tha

s Hamlet. At the close of the season he passed through the provinces, triumphant, and returned to Drury Lane in 1805, to find "garlick amid the flowers," and a strong sibilant opposition, w

ught of him. His last season was at Bath, in 1808; in the July of which year he entered Christ's College, Cambridge, as a Fellow Commoner; subsequent

went through a course of provincial theatres, ending with a month at Covent Garden, with questionable success. His old admirers would have it that he wa

ady played Edward to Mr. Betty's Warwick; in which last character, after fitful appearances in the country, and acting for a single night now and then in London, as a

r of words but not of ideas, and in his boyhood was imperfectly educated. He could learn Hamlet in three or four days, and, no doubt, he played it prettily; but to play prettily and to act masterly, are different things. Hamlet is no matter for a boy to handle. Betterton acted it for fifty years, and, to his own mind, had not thoroughly fathomed the profoundest depths of its philosophy even then. Master Betty commenced too early to learn by r

him, I have to notice something of the manners, customs, sayings, and doings of a past time, which differed greatly from that i

te as M

TNO

kson says nothing about Home, who w

that the terms were fifty

be twenty-

wrong. Betty

oth houses, but his attra

CH TH