place it, when Laura Keene
and Mr. Lester--the Lester Wallack that was to be--did Beatrice and
Benedick. I yield to this further proof that we had our proportion of
Shakespeare, though perhaps antedating that rapt vision of Much Ado,
which may have been preceded by the dazzled apprehension of A Midsummer
Night's Dream at the Broadway (there _was_ a confessed Theatre;) this
latter now present to me in every bright particular. It supplied us, we
must have felt, our greatest conceivable adventure--I cannot otherwise
account for its emerging so clear. Everything here is as of yesterday,
the identity of the actors, the details of their dress, the charm
imparted by the sisters Gougenheim, the elegant elder as the infatuated
Helena and the other, the roguish "Joey" as the mischievous Puck. Hermia
was Mrs. Nagle, in a short salmon-coloured peplum over a white
petticoat, the whole bulgingly confined by a girdle of shining gilt and
forming a contrast to the loose scarves of Helena, while Mr. Nagle, not
devoid, I seem to remember, of a blue chin and the latency of a fine
brogue, was either Lysander or Demetrius; Mr. Davidge (also, I surmise,
with a brogue) was Bottom the weaver and Madame Ponisi Oberon--Madame
Ponisi whose range must have been wide, since I see her also as the
white-veiled heroine of The Cataract of the Ganges, where, preferring
death to dishonour, she dashes up the more or less perpendicular
waterfall on a fiery black steed and with an effect only a little
blighted by the chance flutter of a drapery out of which peeps the leg
of a trouser and a big male foot; and then again, though presumably at a
somewhat later time or, in strictness, _after_ childhood's fond hour, as
this and that noble matron or tragedy queen. I descry her at any rate as
representing all characters alike with a broad brown face framed in
bands or crowns or other heavy headgear out of which cropped a row of
very small tight black curls. The Cataract of the Ganges is all there as
well, a tragedy of temples and idols and wicked rajahs and real water,
with Davidge and Joey Gougenheim again for comic relief--though all in a
coarser radiance, thanks to the absence of fairies and Amazons and
moonlit mechanical effects, the charm above all, so seen, of the play
within the play; and I rank it in that relation with Green Bushes,
despite the celebrity in the latter of Madame Celeste, who came to us
straight out of London and whose admired walk up the stage