lgebra; he wou'd sooner have the
Grace of God than do everybody justice."[A]

[Footnote A: Gildon's "Comparison Between the Two Stages."]

This was the measly director in whose company Nance figured for a time,
and for whom she must have had a profound if discreetly-concealed
contempt. Cibber, who seems to have keenly gauged the man, has left us
an account of how Rich[A] treated his actors. "He would laugh with them
over a bottle and bite them in their bargains. He kept them poor, that
they might not be able to rebel; and sometimes merry, that they might
not think of it." How graphic is this picture, with its vision of sly,
crafty Christopher, as he denies the players their well-earned wages and
then hurries them off to a neighbouring tavern, there to get them
hilarious on cheap wine and grudgingly to pay the reckoning. "All their
articles of agreement," continues Colley, "had a clause in them that he
was sure to creep out at, viz., their respective sallaries were to be
paid in such manner and proportion as others of the same company were
paid; which in effect made them all, when he pleas'd, but limited
sharers of loss, and himself sole proprietor of profits; and this loss
or profit they only had such verbal accounts of as he thought proper to
give them. 'Tis true, he would sometimes advance them money (but not
more than he knew at most could be due to them) upon their bonds; upon
which, whenever they were mutinous, he would threaten to sue them. This
was the net we danc'd in for several years. But no wonder we were
dupes," whimsically adds Colley, "while our master was a lawyer."

[Footnote A: Christopher Rich was the father of John Rich, a manager
who excelled in pantomime, and who appreciated the "legitimate" as
little as did his father.]

And a very commonplace, foxy and inartistic lawyer he was, too, with
his fondness for money bags and his willingness to oblige the town
with anything it wanted. To his narrow mind there was no great
difference between a lot of rope-dancers and a company of players, or,
if there should be, the advantage was quite in favour of the former.
We see the same commercial spirit to-day, when the average manager
rents his house for one week to an Irving or a Mansfield, and perhaps
turns it over, the following Monday night, to the tender mercies of
performing dogs and cats. 'Tis all grist that comes to his mill, and
what cares he whether that grist represent "Macbeth" or canine drama?

C