ng, Miss Malvina, who footed it
and tambourined it and shawled it, irruptively, in lonely state. When
not admiring Mr. Burton in Shakespeare we admired him as Paul Pry, as
Mr. Toodles and as Aminadab Sleek in The Serious Family, and we must
have admired him very much--his huge fat person, his huge fat face and
his vast slightly pendulous cheek, surmounted by a sort of elephantine
wink, to which I impute a remarkable baseness, being still perfectly
present to me.

We discriminated, none the less; we thought Mr. Blake a much finer
comedian, much more of a gentleman and a scholar--"mellow" Mr. Blake,
whom with the brave and emphatic Mrs. Blake (_how_ they must have made
their points!) I connect partly with the Burton scene and partly with
that, of slightly subsequent creation, which, after flourishing awhile
slightly further up Broadway under the charmlessly commercial name of
Brougham's Lyceum (we had almost only Lyceums and Museums and Lecture
Rooms and Academies of Music for playhouse and opera then,) entered upon
a long career and a migratory life as Wallack's Theatre. I fail
doubtless to keep _all_ my associations clear, but what is important, or
what I desire at least to make pass for such, is that when we most
admired Mr. Blake we also again admired Miss Mary Taylor; and it was at
Brougham's, not at Burton's, that we rendered _her_ that
tribute--reserved for her performance of the fond theatrical daughter in
the English version of Le Pere de la Debutante, where I see the charming
panting dark-haired creature, in flowing white classically relieved by a
gold tiara and a golden scarf, rush back from the supposed stage to the
represented green-room, followed by thunders of applause, and throw
herself upon the neck of the broken-down old gentleman in a blue coat
with brass buttons who must have been after all, on second thoughts, Mr.
Placide. Greater flights or more delicate shades the art of pathetic
comedy was at that time held not to achieve; only I straighten it out
that Mr. and Mrs. Blake, not less than Miss Mary Taylor (who
preponderantly haunts my vision, even to the disadvantage of Miss Kate
Horn in Nan the Good-for-Nothing, until indeed she is displaced by the
brilliant Laura Keene) did migrate to Brougham's, where we found them
all themselves as Goldsmith's Hardcastle pair and other like matters. We
rallied especially to Blake as Dogberry, on the occasion of my second
Shakespearean night, for as such I seem to