le the quaint humour of Harley excited roars of laughter
through the whimsicalities of "Is She His Wife?" and "The Strange
Gentleman." Trifles light as air though these effusions might be, the
radiant bubbles showed even then, as by a casual freak which way with
him the breeze in his leisure hours was drifting. A dozen years or more
after this came the private theatricals at Tavistock House. Beginning
simply, first of all, with his direction of his children's frolics in
the enacting of a burletta, of a Cracker Bonbon for Christmas, and of
one of Planche's charming fairy extravaganzas, these led up in the
end through what must be called circuitously Dickens's emendations
of O'Hara's version of Fielding's burlesque of "Tom Thumb," to
the manifestation of the novelist's remarkable genius for dramatic
impersonation: first of all, as Aaron Gurnock in Wilkie Collins's
"Lighthouse," and afterwards as Richard War dour in the same author's
"Frozen Deep." Already he had achieved success, some years earlier,
as an amateur performer in characters not essentially his own, as,
for example, in the representation of the senile blandness of Justice
Shallow, or of the gasconading humours of Captain Bobadil. Just, as
afterwards, in furtherance of the interests of the Guild of Literature
and Art, he impersonated Lord Wilmot in Lytton's comedy of "Not so
Bad as we Seem," and represented in a series of wonderfully rapid
transformations the protean person of Mr. Gabblewig, through the
medium of a delightful farce called "Mr. Nightingale's Diary." Whoever
witnessed Dickens's impersonation of Mr. Gabblewig, will remember that
it included a whole cluster of grotesque creations of his own. Among
these there was a stone-deaf old man, who, whenever he was shouted at,
used to sigh out resignedly, "Ah, it's no use your whispering!" Besides
whom there was a garrulous old lady, in herself the worthy double of
Mrs. Gamp; a sort of half-brother to Sam Weller; and an alternately
shrieking and apologetic valetudinarian, who was, perhaps, the most
whimsical of them all. Nothing more, however, need here be said in
regard to Charles Dickens's share, either in these performances for the
Guild or in the other strictly private theatricals. They are simply here
referred to, as having prepared the way by practice, for the Readings,
still so called, though, in all save costume and general _mis en
scene_, they were from first to last essentially and intensely dramatic