amateur
inclination for the stage, had condescended to show to the public what
excellent actors they could have been, had they so pleased,--what
excellent actors, indeed, some of them were. . . . They proposed . . . a
benefit for myself, . . . and the piece performed on the occasion was Ben
Jonson's _Every Man in his Humour_. . . . If anything had been needed to
show how men of letters include actors, on the common principle of the
greater including the less, these gentlemen would have furnished it. Mr.
Dickens's Bobadil had a spirit in it of intellectual apprehension beyond
anything the existing stage has shown . . . and Mr. Forster delivered the
verses of Ben Jonson with a musical flow and a sense of their grace and
beauty unknown, I believe, to the recitation of actors at present. At
least I have never heard anything like it since Edmund Kean's.". . . To
this may be added some lines from Lord Lytton's prologue spoken at
Liverpool, of which I have not been able to find a copy, if indeed it
was printed at the time; but the verses come so suddenly and completely
back to me, as I am writing after twenty-five years, that in a small way
they recall a more interesting effort of memory told me once by
Macready. On a Christmas night at Drury Lane there came a necessity to
put up the _Gamester_, which he had not played since he was a youth in
his father's theatre thirty years before. He went to rehearsal shrinking
from the long and heavy study he should have to undergo, when, with the
utterance of the opening sentence, the entire words of the part came
back, including even a letter which Beverly has to read, and which it is
the property-man's business to supply. My lines come back as
unexpectedly; but with pleasanter music than any in Mr. Moore's dreary
tragedy, as a few will show.

"Mild amid foes, within a prison free,
He comes . . . our grey-hair'd bard of Rimini!
Comes with the pomp of memories in his train,
Pathos and wit, sweet pleasure and sweet pain!
Comes with familiar smile and cordial tone,
Our hearths' wise cheerer!--Let us cheer his own!
Song links her children with a golden thread,
To aid the living bard strides forth the dead.
Hark the frank music of the elder age--
Ben Jonson's giant tread sounds ringing up the stage!
Hail! the large shapes our fathers loved! again
Wellbred's light ease, and Kitely's je