on condition of
having their respective blue dress-coats turned up with yellow to
represent the family livery, there were others to whom the being
admitted behind the scenes, even in these humble characters, was a
subject of laudable ambition. Nay, unimportant as were some parts in
themselves, they were quite enough for the histrionic talent of some of
our friends. Till I became a manager myself, I always used to lose
patience at the wretched manner in which some of the underlings on the
stage went through the little they had to say and do: there seemed
no reason why the "sticks" should be so provokingly sticky; and it
surprised me that a man who could accost one fluently enough at the
stage-door, should make such a bungle as some of them did in a message
of some half-dozen words "in character." But when I first became
initiated into the mysteries of amateur performances, and saw how
entirely destitute some men were of any notion of natural acting, and
how they made a point of repeating two lines of familiar dialogue with
the tone and manner, but without the correctness, of a schoolboy going
through a task--then it ceased to be any matter of wonder that those to
whom acting was no joke, but an unhappily earnest mode of getting bread,
should so often make their performance appear the uneasy effort which it
is. There was one man in particular, a good-humoured, gentlemanly
fellow, a favourite with us all,--not remarkable for talent, but a
pleasant companion enough, with plenty of common-sense. Well, "he would
be an actor"--it was his own fancy to have a part, and, as he was "one
of us," we could not well refuse him. We give him an easy one, for he
was not vain of his own powers, or ambitious of theatrical distinction;
so he was to be "second fellow"--one of Tony's pot-companions. He had
but two lines to speak; but from the very first time I heard him read
them, I set him down as a hopeless case. He read them as if he had just
learned to spell the words; when he repeated them without the book, it
was like a clergyman giving out a text. And so it was with a good many
of the rank and file of the company; we had more labour to drill them
into something like a natural intonation than to learn our own longest
speeches twice over. So we made their attendance at rehearsals a _sine
qua non_. We dismissed a promising "Mat Muggins" because he went to the
"Union" two nights successively, when he ought to have been at "The
Three Pigeons