Ben Jonson. The _Alchemist_ had
been such a favourite with some of us, that, before finally laying it
aside, we went through two or three rehearsals, in which I recollect
thinking Dickens's Sir Epicure Mammon as good as anything he had done;
and now the same trouble, with the same result, arising from a vain
desire to please everybody, was taken successively with Beaumont and
Fletcher's _Beggar's Bush_, and Goldsmith's _Good Natured Man_, with
Jerrold's characteristic drama of the _Rent Day_, and Bulwer's masterly
comedy of _Money_. Choice was at last made of Shakespeare's _Merry
Wives_, in which Lemon played Falstaff, I took again the jealous husband
as in Jonson's play, and Dickens was Justice Shallow; to which was added
a farce, _Love, Law, and Physick_, in which Dickens took the part he had
acted long ago, before his days of authorship; and, besides the
professional actresses engaged, we had for our Dame Quickly the lady to
whom the world owes incomparably the best _Concordance_ to Shakespeare
that has ever been published, Mrs. Cowden Clarke. The success was
undoubtedly very great. At Manchester, Liverpool, and Edinburgh there
were single representations; but Birmingham and Glasgow had each two
nights, and two were given at the Haymarket, on one of which the Queen
and Prince were present. The gross receipts from the nine performances,
before the necessary large deductions for London and local charges, were
two thousand five hundred and fifty-one pounds and eightpence.[150] The
first representation was in London on the 15th of April, the last in
Glasgow on the 20th of July, and everywhere Dickens was the leading
figure. In the enjoyment as in the labour he was first. His animal
spirits, unresting and supreme, were the attraction of rehearsal at
morning, and of the stage at night. At the quiet early dinner, and the
more jovial unrestrained supper, where all engaged were assembled daily,
his was the brightest face, the lightest step, the pleasantest word.
There seemed to be no rest needed for that wonderful vitality.

My allusion to the last of these splendid strollings in aid of what we
believed to be the interests of men of letters, shall be as brief as I
can make it. Two winters after the present, at the close of November
1850, in the great hall of Lord Lytton's old family mansion in
Knebworth-park, there were three private performances by the original
actors in Ben Jonson's _Every Man in His Humour_. All the circums