ts of boundless amazement, in broad north-country dialect, from
the market folk they passed on the road, to whom they must have appeared
the most violent runaway couple that ever traveled.

Liston, the famous comedian, was at this time a member of the Durham
company, and though he began his career there by reciting Collins's "Ode
to the Passions," attired in a pea-green coat, buckskins, top-boots, and
powder, with a scroll in his hand, and followed up this essay of his
powers with the tragic actor's battle-horse, the part of Hamlet, he soon
found his peculiar gift to lie in the diametrically opposite direction
of broad farce. Of this he was perpetually interpolating original
specimens in the gravest performances of his fellow-actors; on one
occasion suddenly presenting to Mrs. Stephen Kemble, as she stood
disheveled at the side scene, ready to go on the stage as Ophelia in her
madness, a basket with carrots, turnips, onions, leeks, and pot-herbs,
instead of the conventional flowers and straws of the stage maniac,
which sent the representative of the fair Ophelia on in a broad grin,
with ill-suppressed fury and laughter, which must have given quite an
original character of verisimilitude to the insanity she counterfeited.

On another occasion he sent all the little chorister boys on, in the
lugubrious funeral procession in "Romeo and Juliet," with pieces of
brown paper in their hands to wipe their tears with.

The suppression of that very dreadful piece of stage pageantry has at
last, I believe, been conceded to the better taste of modern audiences;
but even in my time it was still performed, and an exact representation
of a funeral procession, such as one meets every day in Rome, with
torch-bearing priests, and bier covered with its black-velvet pall,
embroidered with skull and cross-bones, with a corpse-like figure
stretched upon it, marched round the stage, chanting some portion of the
fine Roman Catholic requiem music. I have twice been in the theatre when
persons have been seized with epilepsy during that ghastly exhibition,
and think the good judgment that has discarded such a mimicry of a
solemn religious ceremony highly commendable.

Another evening, Liston, having painted Fanny Kemble's face like a
clown's, posted her at one of the stage side doors to confront her
mother, poor Mrs. Stephen Kemble, entering at the opposite one to
perform some dismally serious scene of dramatic pathos, who, on suddenly
beholdin