Kitabı oku: «Dickens», sayfa 4

CHAPTER III

STRANGE LANDS

[1842-1847.]

A journey across the Atlantic in midwinter is no child’s-play even at the present day, when, bad though their passage may have been, few people would venture to confess doubts, as Dickens did, concerning the safety of such a voyage by steam in heavy weather. The travellers—for Dickens was accompanied by his wife—had an exceptionally rough crossing, the horrors of which he has described in his American Notes. His powers of observation were alive in the midst of the lethargy of sea-sickness, and when he could not watch others he found enough amusement in watching himself. At last, on January 28, 1842, they found themselves in Boston harbour. Their stay in the United States lasted about four months, during which time they saw Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Chicago, and Buffalo. Then they passed by Niagara into Canada, and after a pleasant visit to Montreal, diversified by private theatricals with the officers there, were safe at home again in July.

Dickens had met with an enthusiastic welcome in every part of the States where he had not gone out of the way of it; in New York, in particular, he had been fêted, with a fervour unique even in the history of American enthusiasms, under the resounding title of “the Guest of the Nation.” Still, even this imposed no moral obligation upon him to take the advice tendered to him in America, and to avoid writing about that country—“we are so very suspicious.” On the other hand, whatever might be his indignation at the obstinate unwillingness of the American public to be moved a hair’s-breadth by his championship of the cause of international copyright,⁵ this failure could not, in a mind so reasonable as his, have outweighed the remembrance of the kindness shown to him and to his fame. But the truth seems to be that he had, if not at first, at least very speedily, taken a dislike to American ways which proved too strong for him to the last. In strange lands, most of all in a country which, like the United States, is not in the least ashamed to be what it is, travellers are necessarily at the outset struck by details; and Dickens’s habit of minute observation was certain not to let him lose many of them. He was neither long enough in the country to study very closely, nor was it in his way to ponder very deeply, the problems involved in the existence of many of the institutions with which he found fault. Thus, he was indignant at the sight of slavery, and even ventured to “tell a piece of his mind” on the subject to a judge in the South; but when, twenty years later, the great struggle came, at the root of which this question lay, his sympathies were with the cause of disunion and slavery in its conflict with the “mad and villanous” North. In short, his knowledge of America and its affairs was gained in such a way and under such circumstances as to entitle him, if he chose, to speak to the vast public which he commanded as an author of men and manners as observed by him; but he had no right to judge the destinies and denounce the character of a great people on evidence gathered in the course of a holiday tour.

Nor, indeed, did the American Notes, published by him after his return home, furnish any serious cause of offence. In an introductory chapter, which was judiciously suppressed, he had taken credit for the book as not having “a grain of any political ingredient in its whole composition.” Indeed, the contents were rather disappointing from their meagreness. The author showed good taste in eschewing all reference to his personal reception, and good judgment in leaving the copyright question undiscussed. But though his descriptions were as vivid as usual—whether of the small steamboat, “of about half a pony power,” on the Connecticut river, or of the dismal scenery on the Mississippi, “great father of rivers, who (praise be to Heaven) has no young children like him!”—and though some of the figure-sketches were touched off with the happiest of hands, yet the public, even in 1842, was desirous to learn something more about America than this. It is true that Dickens had, with his usual conscientiousness, examined and described various interesting public institutions in the States—prisons, asylums, and the like; but the book was not a very full one; it was hardly anything but a sketch-book, with more humour, but with infinitely less poetic spirit, than the Sketch-book of the illustrious American author whose friendship had been one of the chief personal gains of Dickens’s journey.

The American Notes, for which the letters to Forster had furnished ample materials, were published in the year of Dickens’s return, after he had refreshed himself with a merry Cornish trip in the company of his old friend, and his two other intimates, “Stanny” and “Mac.” But he had not come home, as he had not gone out, to be idle. On the first day of the following year, 1843, appeared the first number of the story which was to furnish the real casus discriminis between Dickens and the enemies, as well no doubt as a very large proportion of the friends, whom he had left behind him across the water. The American scenes in Martin Chuzzlewit did not, it is true, begin till the fifth number of the story; nor is it probable from the accounts of the sale, which was much smaller than Dickens had expected, that these particular episodes at first produced any strong feeling in the English public. But the merits of the book gradually obtained for it a popularity at home which has been surpassed by that of but one or two other of Dickens’s works; and in proportion to this popularity was the effect exercised by its American chapters. What that effect has been, it would be hypocrisy to question.

Dickens, it is very clear, had been unable to resist the temptation of at once drawing upon the vast addition to his literary capital as a humourist. That the satire of many of the American scenes in Martin Chuzzlewit is, as satire, not less true than telling, it needs but a small acquaintance with American journalism and oratory even at the present day to perceive; and the heartrending history of Eden, as a type of some of the settlements “vaunted in England as a mine of Golden Hope,” at least had the warrant of something more than hearsay and a look in passing. Nor, as has already been observed, would it have been in accordance either with human nature, or with the fitness of things, had Dickens allowed his welcome in America to become to him (as he termed it in the suppressed Preface to the Notes) “an iron muzzle disguised beneath a flower or two.” But the frankness, to say the least, of the mirror into which he now invited his late hosts to gaze was not likely to produce grateful compliments to its presenter, nor was the effect softened by the despatch with which this souvenir of the “guest of the nation” was pressed upon its attention. No doubt it would have been easy to reflect that only the evil, not the good, sides of social life in America were held up to derision and contempt, and that an honourable American journalist had no more reason to resent the portraiture of Mr. Jefferson Brick than a virtuous English paterfamilias had to quarrel with that of Mr. Pecksniff. Unfortunately, offence is usually taken where offence is meant; and there can be little doubt as to the animus with which Dickens had written. Only two months after landing at Boston Dickens had declared to Macready, that “however much he liked the ingredients of this great dish, he could not but say that the dish itself went against the grain with him, and that he didn’t like it.” It was not, and could not be, pleasant for Americans to find the “New York Sewer, in its twelfth thousand, with a whole column of New Yorkers to be shown up, and all their names printed,” introduced as the first expression of “the bubbling passions of their country;” or to be certified, apropos of a conversation among American “gentlemen” after dinner, that dollars, and dollars only, at the risk of honesty and honour, filled their souls. “No satirist,” Martin Chuzzlewit is told by a candid and open-minded American, “could, I believe, breathe this air.” But satire in such passages as these borders too closely on angry invective; and neither the irresistible force nor the earnest pathos of the details which follow can clear away the suspicion that at the bottom lay a desire to depreciate. Nor was the general effect of the American episodes in Martin Chuzzlewit materially modified by their conclusion, to which, with the best of intentions, the author could not bring himself to give a genuinely complimentary turn. The Americans did not like all this, and could not be expected to like it. The tone of the whole satire was too savage, and its tenor was too hopelessly one-sided, for it to pass unresented; while much in it was too near the truth to glance off harmless. It is well known that in time Dickens came himself to understand this. Before quitting America, in 1868, he declared his intention to publish in every future edition of his American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit his testimony to the magnanimous cordiality of his second reception in the States, and to the amazing changes for the better which he had seen everywhere around him during his second sojourn in the country. But it is not likely that the postscript, all the more since it was added under circumstances so honourable to both sides, has undone, or will undo, the effect of the text. Very possibly the Americans may, in the eyes of the English people as well as in their own, cease to be chargeable with the faults and foibles satirised by Dickens; but the satire itself will live, and will continue to excite laughter and loathing, together with the other satire of the powerful book to which it belongs.

For in none of his books is that power, which at times filled their author himself with astonishment, more strikingly and abundantly revealed than in The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit. Never was his inventive force more flexible and more at his command; yet none of his books cost him more hard work. The very names of hero and novel were only the final fortunate choice out of a legion of notions; though “Pecksniff” as well as “Charity” and “Mercy” (“not unholy names, I hope,” said Mr. Pecksniff to Mrs. Todgers) were first inspirations. The MS. text too is full of the outward signs of care. But the author had his reward in the general impression of finish which is conveyed by this book as compared with its predecessors; so that Martin Chuzzlewit may be described as already one of the masterpieces of Dickens’s maturity as a writer. Oddly enough, the one part of the book which moves rather heavily is the opening chapter, an effort in the mock-heroic, probably suggested by the author’s eighteenth century readings.

A more original work, however, than Martin Chuzzlewit was never composed, or one which more freshly displays the most characteristic qualities of its author’s genius. Though the actual construction of the story is anything but faultless—for what could be more slender than the thread by which the American interlude is attached to the main action, or more wildly improbable than the hazardous stratagem of old Martin upon which that action turns?—yet it is so contrived as to fulfil the author’s avowed intention of exhibiting under various forms the evil and the folly of selfishness. This vice is capable of both serious and comic treatment, and commended itself in each aspect to Dickens as being essentially antagonistic to his moral and artistic ideals of human life. A true comedy of humours thus unfolded itself with the progress of his book, and one for which the types had not been fetched from afar: “Your homes the scene; yourselves the actors here,” had been the motto which he had at first intended to put upon his title-page. Thus, while in “the old-established firm of Anthony Chuzzlewit and Son” selfishness is cultivated as a growth excellent in itself, and the son’s sentiment, “Do other men, for they would do you,” is applauded by his admiring father, in young Martin the vice rather resembles a weed strong and rank, yet not so strong but that it gives way at last before a manly endeavour to uproot it. The character of the hero, though very far from heroic, is worked out with that reliance upon the fellow-feeling of candid readers which in our great novelists of the eighteenth century has obtained sympathy for much less engaging personages. More especially is the young man’s loss of self-respect in the season of his solitary wretchedness depicted with admirable feeling. It would not, I think, be fanciful to assert that in this story Dickens has with equal skill distinguished between two species of unselfishness. Mark Tapley’s is the actively unselfish nature, and though his reiteration of his guiding motive is wearisome and occasionally absurd, yet the power of coming out jolly under unpropitious circumstances is a genuinely English ideal of manly virtue. Tom Pinch’s character, on the other hand, is unselfish from innate sweetness; and never has the art of Dickens drawn a type which, while closely approaching the border-line of the grotesque, is yet so charmingly true to nature.

Grotesque characters proper are numerous enough in this book, but all the others pale before the immortal presence of Mrs. Gamp. She had been traced to an original in real life, but her literary right to stand on her own legs has been most properly vindicated against any supposition of likeness to the different type, the subject of Leigh Hunt’s Monthly Nurse—a paper, by-the-way, distinguished by shrewdness as well as feeling. Imagination has never taken bolder flights than those requisite for the development of Mrs. Gamp’s mental processes:

“‘And which of all them smoking monsters is the Ankworks boat, I wonder? Goodness me!’ cried Mrs. Gamp.

“‘What boat did you want?’ asked Ruth.

“‘The Ankworks package,’ Mrs. Gamp replied. ‘I will not deceive you, my sweet. Why should I?’

“‘That is the Antwerp packet in the middle,’ said Ruth.

“‘And I wish it was in Jonadge’s belly, I do!’ cried Mrs. Gamp, appearing to confound the prophet with the whale in this miraculous aspiration.”

A hardly inferior exertion of creative power was needed in order to fix in distinct forms the peculiarities of her diction, nay, to sustain the unique rhythm of her speech:

“‘I says to Mrs. Harris,’ Mrs. Gamp continued, ‘only t’ other day, the last Monday fortnight as ever dawned upon this Piljian’s Projiss of a mortal wale; I says to Mrs. Harris, when she says to me, “Years and our trials, Mrs. Gamp, sets marks upon us all”—“Say not the words, Mrs. Harris, if you and me is to be continual friends, for sech is not the case.”’”

Yet the reality of Mrs. Gamp has been acknowledged to be such that she has been the death of her sisterhood in a great part (to say the least) of our hospital wards and sick-rooms; and as for her oddities of tongue, they are, with the exception of her boldest figures, but the glorified type of all the utterances heard to this day from charwomen, laundresses, and single gentlemen’s house-keepers. Compared with her, even her friend and patron, Mr. Mould, and her admirer, Mr. Bailey, and in other parts of the book the low company at Todgers’s and the fine company at Mr. Tigg Montague’s sink into insignificance. The aged Chuffey is a grotesque study of a very different kind, of which the pathos never loses itself in exaggeration. As for Pecksniff, he is as far out of the range of grotesque as, except when moralising over the banisters at Todgers’s, he is out of that of genial characters. He is the richest comic type, while at the same time one of the truest, among the innumerable reproductions in English imaginative literature of our favourite national vice—hypocrisy. His friendliness is the very quintessence of falsehood: “Mr. Pinch,” he cries to poor Tom over the currant-wine and captain’s biscuits, “if you spare the bottle, we shall quarrel!” His understanding with his daughters is the very perfection of guile, for they confide in him, even when ignorant of his intentions, because of their certainty “that in all he does he has his purpose straight and full before him.” And he is a man who understands the times as well as the land in which he lives; for, as M. Taine has admirably pointed out, where Tartuffe would have been full of religious phrases, Pecksniff presents himself as a humanitarian philosopher. Comic art has never more successfully fulfilled its highest task after its truest fashion than in this picture of the rise and fall of a creature who never ceases to be laughable, and yet never ceases to be loathsome. Nothing is wanting in this wonderful book to attest the exuberance of its author’s genius. The kindly poetic spirit of the Christmas books breathes in sweet Ruth Pinch; and the tragic power of the closing chapters of Oliver Twist is recalled by the picture of Jonas before and after his deed of blood. I say nothing of merely descriptive passages, though in none of his previous stories had Dickens so completely mastered the secret of describing scenery and weather in their relation to his action or his characters.

Martin Chuzzlewit ran its course of twenty monthly numbers; but already a week or two before the appearance of the first of these, Dickens had bestowed upon the public, young and old, the earliest of his delightful Christmas Books. Among all his productions perhaps none connected him so closely, and as it were personally, with his readers. Nor could it well have been otherwise; since nowhere was he so directly intent upon promoting kindliness of feeling among men—more especially good-will, founded upon respect, towards the poor. Cheerfulness was, from his point of view, twin-sister to charity; and sulkiness, like selfishness, belonged, as an appropriate ort, to the dust-heap of “Tom Tiddler’s Ground.” What more fit than that he should mingle such sentiments as these with the holly and the mistletoe of the only English holiday in which remains a vestige of religious and poetic feeling? Beyond all doubt there is much that is tedious in the cultus of Father Christmas, and there was yet more in the days when the lower classes in England had not yet come to look upon a sufficiency of periodical holidays as part of their democratic inheritance. But that Dickens should constitute himself its chief minister and interpreter was nothing but fit. Already one of the Sketches had commended a Christmas-dinner at which a seat is not denied even to “poor Aunt Margaret;” and Mr. Pickwick had never been more himself than in the Christmas game of Blind-man’s-buff at Dingley Dell, in which “the poor relations caught the people who they thought would like it,” and, when the game flagged, “got caught themselves.” But he now sought to reach the heart of the subject; and the freshness of his fancy enabled him delightfully to vary his illustrations of a text of which it can do no man harm to be reminded in as well as out of season.

Dickens’s Christmas books were published in the Christmas seasons of 1843-1846, and of 1848. If the palm is to be granted to any one among them above its fellows, few readers would hesitate, I think, to declare themselves in favour of The Cricket on the Hearth, as tender and delicate a domestic idyl as any literature can boast. But the informing spirit proper of these productions, the desire to stir up a feeling of benevolence, more especially towards the poor and lowly, nowhere shows itself more conspicuously than in the earliest, A Christmas Carol in Prose, and nowhere more combatively than in the second in date, the “Goblin Story” of The Chimes. Of the former its author declared that he “wept and laughed and wept again” over it, “and excited himself in a most extraordinary manner in the composition; and thinking thereof he walked about the black streets of London, fifteen and twenty miles many a night, when all the sober folks had gone to bed.” Simple in its romantic design like one of Andersen’s little tales, the Christmas Carol has never lost its hold upon a public in whom it has called forth Christmas thoughts which do not all centre on “holly, mistletoe, red berries, ivy, turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, meat, pigs, sausages, oysters, pies, puddings, fruit, and punch;” and the Cratchit household, with Tiny Tim, who did not die, are living realities even to those who have not seen Mr. Toole—an actor after Dickens’s own heart—as the father of the family, shivering in his half-yard of comforter.

In The Chimes, composed in self-absorbed solitude at Genoa, he imagined that “he had written a tremendous book, and knocked the Carol out of the field.” Though the little work failed to make “the great uproar” he had confidently anticipated, its purpose was certainly unmistakable; but the effect of hard exaggerations such as Mr. Filer and Alderman Cute, and of a burlesque absurdity like Sir Joseph Bowley, was too dreary to be counteracted by the more pleasing passages of the tale. In his novel Hard Times Dickens afterwards reproduced some of the ideas, and repeated some of the artistic mistakes, to be found in The Chimes, though the design of the later work was necessarily of a more mixed kind. The Christmas book has the tone of a doctrinaire protest against doctrinaires, and, as Forster has pointed out, is manifestly written under the influence of Carlyle. But its main doctrine was one which Dickens lost no opportunity of proclaiming, and which here breaks forth in the form of an indignant appeal by Richard Fern, the outlaw in spite of himself: “Gentlefolks, be not hard upon the poor!” No feeling was more deeply rooted in Dickens’s heart than this; nor could he forbear expressing it by invective and satire as well as by humorous and pathetic pictures of his clients, among whom Trotty Veck too takes a representative place.

The Cricket on the Hearth, as a true work of art, is not troubled about its moral, easily though half-a-dozen plain morals might be drawn from it; a purer and more lightsome creation of the fancy has never been woven out of homespun materials. Of the same imaginative type, though not executed with a fineness so surpassing, is The Battle of Life, the treatment of a fancy in which Dickens appears to have taken great pleasure. Indeed, he declared that he was “thoroughly wretched at having to use the idea for so short a story.” As it stands, it is a pretty idyl of resignation, very poetical in tone as well as in conception, though here and there, notwithstanding the complaint just quoted, rather lengthy. It has been conjectured, with much probability, that the success which had attended dramatic versions of Dickens’s previous Christmas books caused “those admirable comedians, Mr. and Mrs. Keeley,” to be in his mind “when he drew the charming characters of Britain and Clemency Newcome.” At all events the pair serve as good old bits of English pottery to relieve the delicate Sèvres sentiment of Grace and Marion. In the last of Dickens’s Christmas books, The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain, he returns once more to a machinery resembling those of the earliest. But the fancy on which the action turns is here more forced, and the truth which it illustrates is after all only a half-truth, unless taken as part of the greater truth, that the moral conditions of man’s life are more easily marred than mended. Once more the strength of the book lies in its humorous side. The picture of the good Milly’s humble protégés, the Tetterby family, is to remind us that happiness consists precisely in that which the poor and the rich may alike obtain, but which it is so difficult for the poor, amidst their shifts and shabbiness, to keep fresh and green. Even without the evil influence of an enchanted chemist, it is hard enough for the Mrs. Tetterbys of real life always to be ministering angels to their families; for the hand of every little Tetterby not occasionally to be against the other little Tetterbys, and even for a devoted Johnny’s temper never to rise against Moloch. All the more is that to be cherished in the poor which makes them love one another.

More than one of these Christmas books, both the humour and the sentiment of which are so peculiarly English, was written on foreign soil. Dickens’s general conceptions of life, not less than his literary individuality, had been formed before he became a traveller and sojourner in foreign lands. In Italy, as elsewhere, a man will, in a sense, find only what he takes there. At all events the changed life brought with it for Dickens, though not at once, a refreshment and a brief repose which invigorated him for some of the truest efforts of his genius. His resolution to spend some time on the Continent had not been taken rashly, although it was at least hastened by business disappointments. He seems at this time, as was virtually inevitable, to have seen a good deal of society in London, and more especially to have become a welcome guest of Lady Blessington and Count d’Orsay at Gore House. Moreover, his services were beginning to be occasionally claimed as a public speaker; and altogether he must have found more of his time than he wished slipping through his hands. Lastly, he very naturally desired to see what was to be seen, and to enjoy what was to be enjoyed, by one gifted with a sleepless observation and animated by a genuine love of nature and art. The letters, public and private, which he wrote from Italy, are not among the most interesting productions of his pen; even his humour seems now and then ill at ease in them, and his descriptive power narrow in its range. His eyes were occasionally veiled, as are those of most travellers in quest of “first impressions.” Thus I cannot but think his picture of Naples inadequate, and that of its population unjust. Again, although he may have told the truth in asserting that the Eternal City, at first sight, “looked like—I am half afraid to write the word—like London,” and although his general description of Rome has been pronounced correct by competent judgment, yet it is impossible to ignore in it the undertone of Bow Bells. On the other hand, not even in his newspaper letters can he be said to fall into affectation; his impressions are never given pretentiously, and are accordingly seldom altogether worthless; while his criticisms of works of art, when offered, are candid and shrewd, besides being invariably his own.

Thus, there was never anything truer in its way than the account which he gave to Maclise of his first impressions a few days after his arrival at Albaro, a suburb of Genoa, where he found himself settled with his family in July, 1844. He re-christened his abode, the Villa Bagnerello (“it sounds romantic, but Signor Banderello is a butcher hard by”), “the Pink Jail.” Here, with abundance of space and time, and with a view from his writing-table of “the sea, the mountains, the washed-out villas, the vineyards, the blistering hot fort, with a sentry on the drawbridge standing in a bit of shadow no broader than his own musket, and the sky,” he began his villeggiatura, and resolving not to know, or to be known where it could be helped, looked round him at his leisure. This looking round very naturally took up some time; for the circuit of Dickens’s daily observation was unusually wide. Soon he was seeking winter-quarters in Genoa it self, and by October was established in the Palazzo Peschiere, situate on a height within the walls of the city, and overlooking the whole of it, with the harbour and the sea beyond. “There is not in Italy, they say (and I believe them), a lovelier residence.” Even here, however, among fountains and frescoes, it was some time before he could set steadily to work at his Christmas story. At last the bells of Genoa chimed a title for it into his restless ears; and, though longing with a nostalgy that was specially strong upon him at periods of mental excitement for his nightly walks in the London streets, he settled down to his task. I have already described the spirit in which he executed it. No sooner was the writing done than the other half of his double artist-nature was seized with another craving. The rage which possesses authors to read their writings aloud to sympathizing ears, if such can be found, is a well-worn theme of satire; but in Dickens the actor was almost as strong as the author, and he could not withstand the desire to interpret in person what he had written, and to watch its effect with his own eyes and ears. In the first days of November, therefore, he set off from Genoa, and made his way home by Bologna, Venice, Milan, and the Simplon Pass. Of this journey his Pictures from Italy contains the record, including a chapter about Venice, pitched in an unusually poetic key. But not all the memories of all the Doges could have stayed the execution of his set purpose. On the 30th of November he reached London, and on the 2d of December he was reading the Chimes, from the proofs, to the group of friends immortalised in Maclise’s inimitable sketch. Three days afterwards the reading was repeated to a slightly different audience; and, indeed, it would seem, from an enthusiastic postscript to a letter addressed to his wife, that he had read at least part of the book to Macready on the night before that of the first conclave. The distance was no doubt wide between the intimacy of these friendly readings and the stormy seas of public audiences; but, however unconsciously, the first step had been taken. It may be worth noticing, in connexion with this, that the scheme of a private dramatic performance, which was to occupy much of Dickens’s “leisure” in the year following, was proposed for the first time on the occasion of the first reading of the Chimes. Before Christmas he was back again in his “Italian bowers.” If the strain of his effort in writing the Chimes had been severe, the holiday which followed was long. In the later winter and early spring of 1845 he and the ladies of his family saw Rome and Naples, and in June their Italian life came to an end, and they were in London before the close of the month. Projects of work remained in abeyance until the absorbing fancy of a private play had been realised with an earnestness such as only Dickens could carry into his amusements, and into this particular amusement above all others. The play was Every Man in his Humour; the theatre, the little house in Dean Street, of whose chequered fortunes no theatrical history has succeeded in exhausting the memories; and the manager was, of course, “Bobadil,” as Dickens now took to signing himself. His joking remark to Macready, that he “thought of changing his present mode of life, and was open to an engagement,” was after all not so very wide of the mark. According to the inevitable rule in such things, he and his friends—among whom Mark Lemon, Douglas Jerrold, and Forster were conspicuous—were “induced” to repeat their performance at a larger house for a public charity, and later in the year they played The Elder Brother for Miss Fanny Kelly’s benefit. Leigh Hunt, whose opinion, however, could hardly fail to be influenced by the circumstances under which Ben Jonson’s comedy was afterwards performed by the amateurs, and who was no longer the youthful Draco of the News, afterwards spoke very highly of Dickens’s Bobadil. It had “a spirit in it of intellectual apprehension beyond anything the existing stage has shown.” His acting in the farce which followed Leigh Hunt thought “throughout admirable; quite rich and filled up.”