and a new and still wider field opens in the contemporary essays, diaries, letters, and even newspapers and magazines. Such a work, then, as Doctor Doran's, grasping this scattered and voluminous literature, extracting and fixing its essence with a discriminating and vigorous chemistry, and so bringing all that is most instructive, diverting, and curious in his charming theme, within reasonable compass, and in the form of connected and highly agreeable narrative, under the eye of the careless reader, is no mean monument of zeal, diligence, and judgment.

He has given us here a work which, possessing all the charm of lively and romantic fiction, is still, in the most rigorous sense, a history; comprehensive, complete, and pregnant with valuable social illustration, as well as with matter for profound and sad meditation.

Doctor Doran's plan is strictly and simply chronological. And the book expands and warms into actual life with the stage of the Restoration, of which we have so many lively and invalue contemporary pictures.

Of course we have a good deal of pretty Nell Gwyn; not so detailed as Mr. Cunningham's pleasant monogram, but written with appropriate spirit, grace and lightness. We can hardly bring ourselves to believe altogether in the story of her very low origin. Though Mistress Nelly could be a little coarse at times, there seems to have been an essential elegance and a bright and delicate wit which bespeak early and habitual intimacy with gentle manners. The selling of herrings in her case, as in that of beautiful Peg Woftington in aftertimes, is, we suspect, wholly a myth. There has always been a tendency to exaggeration of this kind in the early and conjectural biography of actresses. Mistress Nelly was, we all know, a good-natured and fascinating scamp. The circumstances of her departure from the parental roof were probably not very creditable. Her London life commenced as that of an outcast, and she was forced to live by her wits, which luckily were bright and shifty. Such people do not care to describe early days and adventures too minutely. And conjecture and satire fill in the vacant canvas

with a coarse extravagance. Poor Nelly! Good nature, gaiety, beauty, and intelligence, are always so engaging; a certain sentimental tenderness still lingers about her memory-the shadow of her living popularity. There is a very pretty engraving of Nell Gwyn in the collection of prologues and epilogues. From what portrait is it taken? An original, full-length picture, fair, animated, and so pretty, is in the possession of the Earl of Dunraven. No doubt Nelly was a frequent sitter; and many scattered portraits remain as yet unsuspected by the public. Pepys, that delightful gossip and indefatigable frequenter of the playhouses, is full of her. Nell, as we all know, was the maternal origin of the ducal house of St. Albans, a second time infused with theatric blood in its matrimonial alliance with Mrs. Coutts-the famous and beautiful Miss Mellon-whose amusing memoirs many of our readers are, no doubt, well acquainted with.

once

Dr. Doran is severe upon poor Nelly. Notwithstanding his rigorous impeachment, however, we still cling to the old tradition of her kindness and popularity. There are abundant evidences in her short career, so sad and brilliant, of that charity which covereth a multitude of sins. Instances of her good-natured munificence are not wanting, and her contemporary reputation for benevolence is undoubted. "For such a person," says Doctor Doran, indignantly, "the pure and pious Bishop Kenn was called upon to yield up an apartment in which he lodged." In the cause of historic truth, however, and as throwing, we think, a side-light upon the character of poor Nelly, we must complete the story. Kenn was no bishop, but a poor Churchman, at the time. He owed his bishoprick, however, to his refusal. "Where is the little man who refused to let Nelly lie in his lodgings?" as nearly as we remember, were the words in which Charles sought out Kenn for the vacant mitre. Charles was not a man to enrage his mistress for a caprice of conscience. Nelly and he must often have talked over the incident together; and we think it must rest upon the mind of any person tolerably acquainted with human nature, and that phase of it which is termed "the world," as an

irresistible, though indirect, evidence of the sweet and forgiving nature of wayward and pleasant Nelly, that his scruple was remembered to his honour, and the man who refused to open his door to her, with a sad reverence sought out for the vacant dignity.

Of the stage from the Restoration to the Revolution, our principal authorities are the invaluable Pepys, and the retrospective and graphic portraits preserved to us in old Colley Cibber's masterly "Apology"-one of the pleasantest and finest combinations of biography and criticism extant in English literature.

Betterton's long reign of fifty years, connecting the seventeenth with the eighteenth century, furnishes some of the finest and most interesting pages in Dr. Doran's work. We are acquainted with no biography of that great actor and gentleman, except the miserable sham published shortly after his death, in 1710. This book-the merest catch-penny-contains, when sifted, scarcely more than the registry of his birth and death, the name of his wife, and a list of his principal characters. Here, then, our author has been thrown altogether upon the resources of his devious and extensive reading; and to make up the sum of his biography in minute and desultory contributions, collected with laudable industry and judgment from the wide range of scattered contemporary records. He has given us a portrait distinct in outline, clear in colour, and altogether so noble and life-like, that, considering alike his difficulties and the result, we are disposed to accept it as, perhaps, his finest sketch. He first presents young Betterton on the boards of Lincoln's Inn Fields, in 1661.

"On a December night, 1661, there is a crowded house at the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields. The play is 'Hamlet,' with young Mr. Betterton, who has been two years on the stage, in the part of the Dane. The Ophelia is the real object of the young fellow's love, charming Mistress Saunder

son.

Old ladies and gentlemen, repairing in capacious coaches to this representation, remind one another of the lumbering and crushing of carriages about the old play house in the Blackfriars, causing noisy tumults which drew indignant appeals from the Puritan housekeepers, whose privacy was sadly disturbed.

*

*

*

The

"At length the audience are all safely housed, and eager. Indifferent enough, however, they are, during the opening scenes. The fine gentlemen laugh loudly, and comb fops stand erect in the boxes, to show how their periwigs in the "best rooms." folly looks in clean linen; and the orange nymphs, with their costly entertainment of fruit from Seville, giggle and chatter, as they stand on the benches below, with old and young admirers, proud of being recognised in the boxes. The whole Court of Denmark is before them; but not till the words, "Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,' fall from the lips of Betterton, is the general ear charmed, or the general tongue arrested. Then, indeed, the vainest listen too. The voice is so low, and sad and fops and pertest orange-girls look round and sweet; the modulation so tender, the dignity so natural, the grace so consummate, that all yield themselves silently to the delicious enchantment. 'It's beyond imagination,' whispers Mr. Pepys to his neighbour, who only answers with a long and low-drawn

'Hush!"

The picture of the old days of the illustrious and faithful couple is too pretty to be passed by :—

"Fifty years after these early triumphs, an aged couple resided in one of that he uses in Russell-street, Covent Garden, he walls of which were covered with pictures, prints, and drawings, selected with taste and judg ment. They were still a handsome pair. The venerable lady, indeed, looks pale and somewhat saddened. The gleam of April sunshine which penetrates the apartment cannot win her from the fire. She is Mrs. Betterton; and ever and anon she looks with a sort of proud sorrow on her aged husband. His fortune, nobly earned, has been diminished by "speculation," but the means whereby he achieved it are his still; and Thomas Betterton, in the latter years of Queen Anne, is the chief glory of the stage, even as he was in the last year of King Charles. The lofty column, however, is a little shaken. It is not a ruin, but is beautiful in its decay. Yet, that it should decay at all is a source of so much tender anxiety to the actor's wife, that her senses suffer disturbance, and there may be seen in her features something of the distraught Ophelia of half a century ago."

We come now to his last meeting with that judicious and affectionate audience, who, to the close, were so proud of their Roscius :

"It is the 13th of April, 1710-his benefit night; and the tears are in the lady's eyes, and a painful sort of smile on her trembling lips, for Betterton misses her as he goes

forth that afternoon to take leave, as it proved, of the stage for ever. He is in such pain from gout that he can scarcely walk to his carriage; and how is he to enact the noble and fiery Melantius in that illnamed drama of horror, The Maid's Tragedy'? Hoping for the best, the old player is conveyed to the theatre, built by Sir John Vanbrugh, in the Haymarket, the site of which is now occupied by the Operahouse.' Through the stage-door he is carried in loving arms to his dressing-room. At the end of an hour Wilkes is there, and Pinkethman, and Mrs. Barry, all dressed for their parts; and agreeably disappointed to find the Melantius of the night robed, armoured, and besworded, with one foot in a buskin and the other in a slipper. To enable him even to wear the latter, he had first thrust his inflamed foot into water; but stout as he seemed, trying his strength to-and-fro in the room, the hand of Death was at that moment descending on the grandest of English actors."

The annals of the theatre abound in many instances of such histrionic heroism. Having gone so far let us see him on the stage, and wait till the curtain descends for the last time upon that famous actor.

"The house rose to receive him who had delighted themselves, their sires, and their grandsires. The audience were packed 'like Norfolk biffins.' The edifice itself was only five years old, and when it was a-building,

people laughed at the folly which reared a new theatre in the country, instead of in London; for in 1705, all beyond the rural Haymarket was open field, straight away westward and northward. That such a house could ever be filled, was set down as an impossibility; but the achievement was accomplished on this eventful benefit night; when the popular favourite was about to utter his last words, and to belong thenceforward only to the history of the stage he

had adorned.

"There was a shout which shook him, as Lysippus uttered the words, 'Noble Melantius!' which heralded his coming. Every word which could be applied to himself was marked by a storm of applause, and when Melantius said of Amintor

'His youth did promise much, and his ripe

years

Will see it all performed,'

a murmuring comment ran round the house, that this had been effected by Betterton himself. Again, when he bids Amintor, 'Hear thy friend, who has more years than thou,' there were probably few who did not wish that Betterton were as young as Wilkes; but when he subsequently thundered forth

'My heart And limbs are still the same: my will as great To do you service!'

No one doubted more than a fractional part of this assertion; and Betterton, acting to the end under a continued fire of Bravoes! may have thrown more than the original meaning into the phrase

'That little word was worth all sounds That ever I shall hear again!'

"Few were the words he was destined ever to hear again; and the subsequent prophecy of his own certain and proximate death, on which the curtain slowly descended, was fulfilled eight-and-forty hours after they were uttered."

We have a great deal of pleasant gossip about the poets, their works, fortunes, and quarrels. The field of dramatic, even more than of histrionic criticism, has been travelled over so often and in such good company, that little remains for new discovery or remark. Doctor Doran, however, gives us a great deal of just as well as amusing criticism and analysis, pointed by anecdote, and illustrated with parallels and side-lights supplied by his own large reading. As an average sample of his manner, we quote the sentence in which he takes leave of half-a-dozen of our old-world dramatic celebrities.

an

His

"Davenant achieved a good estate, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, like a gentleman. Dryden, with less to bequeath, was interred in the same place, without organ or ceremony, two choristers walking before the body, candle in hand, and singing ode of Horace-like a poet. victim, Tom Shadwell, acquired wealth fairly; he lies in Chelsea Church, but his son raised a monument to his memory in the Abbey, that he might be in thus much as great a man as his satirist. Congreve, too, is there, after enjoying a greater fortune than the others together had ever built up, and leaving £10,000 of it to Henrietta, Duchess of Marlborough, who so valued the

honour and pleasure of his company' when living, that, as the next best thing, she sat of an evening with his 'wax figure,' after he was dead. Among the dead there, also, rest Cibber, Vanbrugh, and Bowe, of

whom the first, too careless of his money affairs, died the poorest man.'

The young Duchess, however, had written "the honour and happiness of his company." It was wicked old Sarah who misread the sentence for the sake of a sneer; and said she could not perceive the honour, whatever pleasure there might have been in it. Doctor Doran, no doubt, remembered the true reading; but concurring in the justice of the old lady's sarcasm, he has suffered her sly interpretation to stand unchallenged in his pages.

In his usual agreeable and rapid way he describes the mystification practised on the theatrical world of Paris, respecting Vanbrugh's "Relapse."

"Of Vanbrugh's ten or eleven plays, that which has longest kept the stage is the 'Relapse,' still acted, in its altered form, by Sheridan, as the 'Trip to Scarborough.' This piece was produced at the Theatre de l'Odeon, in Paris, in the Spring of 1862, as a posthumous comedy of Voltaire's!

It

was called the 'Comte de Boursoufle,' and had a 'run.' The story ran with it that Voltaire had composed it in his younger days for private representation; that he had then touched it up, and that the manuscript had only recently been discovered by the lucky individual who persuaded the manager of the Odeon to produce it on his stage! The bait took. All the French theatrical world in the capital flocked to the Faubourg St Germain to witness a new play by Voltaire. Critics examined the plot, philosophized on its humour, applauded its absurdities, enjoyed its wit, and congratulated themselves on the circumstance that the Voltairean wit especially was as enjoyable then as in the preceding century! Of the authorship they had no doubt whatever; for, said they, if Voltaire did not write this piece, who could have written it? The reply was given at once from this country; but when the mystification was exposed, the French critics gave no sign of awarding honour where honour was due; and probably this translation of the Relapse,' may figure in future French editions as an undoubted work by Voltaire."

We have here a collection of obituary notes very striking in their collective moral.

"Better men than either of the last sleep in humbler graves. Poor Nat Lee, tottering homeward from the Bull and Harrow, on a winter's night, and with more punch under his belt than his brain could bear,

falls down in the snow, near Duke-street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, and is dead when he is picked up. Lee is shuffled away to St. Clement's Danes. If Lee died tipsy outside a public-house, Otway died half-starved within one, at the Bull, on Tower-hill. The merits of Lee and Otway might have carried them to Westminster, but their misfortunes barred the way thither. Almost as unfortunate, Settle died, after hissing in a dragon at Bartholomew Fair, a recipient of the charity of the Charter-house. Crowne died in distress, just as he hoped his 'Sir Courtly Nice,' would have placed him at his ease. Wicherley, with less excuse, died more embarrassed than Crowne, or would have done

so, had he not robbed his young wife of her left her little wherewith to bury him in the churchyard in Covent Garden. Two other poets, who passed away unencumbered by a single splendid shilling, rest in St. James's, Westminster-Tom Durfey and Bankes. Careless, easy, free, and fuddling Tate died in the sanctuary of the Mint, and St. George's, Southwark, gave him a few feet of earth; while Brady pushed his way at court to preferment, and died a comfortable pluralist and chaplain to Caroline, Princess of Wales. Farquhar, with all his wit, died a broken-hearted beggar, at the age of thirty-seven; and Dennis, who struggled forty years longer with fortune, came to the same end, utterly destitute of all but the contemptuous pity of his foes, and the insulting charity of Pope."

portion, made it over with his creditors, and

A word or two of lively sketchingthe tailor and valet, as cultivated by a note of the expressive province of some of the notables-should we say "immortals"—of the drama of the seventeenth century, will amuse our readers

"In his bag-wig, his black velvet dress, his sword, powder, brilliant buckles, and self-possession, Southerne charmed his company, wherever he visited, even at fourscore. He kept the even tenor of his way, owing no man anything; never allowing his nights to be the marrer of his mornings; and at six-and-eighty carrying a bright eye, heart, wherewith to calmly meet and make a steady hand, a clear head and a warm surrender of all to the Inevitable Angel.

used to subsequently say could never be got together again. Otway's thoughtful eye redeemed his slovenly dress and his fatness, and seemed to warrant the story of his repenting after his carousing. Lee dressed as ill as Otway, but lacked his contemplative eye, yet excelled him in fair looks, and in a peculiar luxuriance of hair."

We have long wished for such a work as Dr. Doran has just produced. So lively in style; so sparkling with anecdote; so sound in ethics; and so scholarlike in criticism. Here, indeed, we have a more perfect history than we believed practicable, of so vast and varied a progress, and so multitudinous a community, within two volumes, even of so imposing a compass as his. He has made a very delightful and masterly contribution to that store of literature which combines biography and history; and he treats it with that lively sympathy with the romantic and humorous, and that quick and true appreciation of character, which will fascinate the idle no less than the thoughtful. It would be injustice to omit mentioning in passing, how very striking and brilliant is the sketch of Edmund Kean, with which the work closes. In this Doctor Doran has given, occasionally, his own impressions of the great actor, as he declaimed "before the floats." The few analytic sentences which he thus gives us, are detailed, new, and vivid, and tantalize, moreover, by their infrequency. Doctor Doran's work closes just where his personal recollections as a playgoer begin. We are glad to learn, from a passing allusion, that he has kept a diary of his impressions. Doctor Doran has, therefore, material in the stores of his own memory, as well as in the living recollections which surround him, which qualify him to give to his own and future times a work upon the same plan as "Davies' Miscellanies," but illimit

ably superior.

The theatric criticism of each generation owes that legacy to posterity. Without such a record, how much of the individuality of the actor's impersonation is lost. If it had not been for Davies, what a portrait of Colley Cibber, in Shallow, for instance, would have been wanting; and how, merely a reputation and a name some of those who now stand out in such minute handling and bright tints, even in the imperfect pages of the actor-bibliopole. Doctor Doran has a kindred field of immense variety and fertility. He has shown himself, both in apprehension and in art, well qualified for the production of such portraits as must ultimately become the authorities on which future times will form their estimate of our Glovers, Vestrises, C. Keans, W. Farrens, Mathewses, Southernes, and the rest. The criticisms of the newspaper press are, as a general rule, too hurried, and consciously too much addressed to the impression of the hour; and too multitudinous, beside, and desultory, to stand in lieu of such a work, conceived in a historic spirit, after the subsidence of stage faction, and of public enthusiasm, with the advantages alike of personal recollection and of calm judgment; with, moreover, a feeling of judicial responsibility, and a proper reverence for the marvellous art of which it must become a text-book.

Such a work we should see, with confidence, committed to the diligence, sympathy, and taste of the writer of these charming annals of "Their Majesty's Servants."

Doctor Doran's is in every sense a good and adequate book. More voluminous works may hereafter be written upon the same theme, but none, we venture to predict, which, within similar limits, will supersede, or even disturb it.