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patience, the play began in good earnest, and was most favourably received. Indeed, as the only price of admission exacted was a promise of civil behaviour, and there were two servants busily employed in handing about punch and
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it would have been rather hard if we did not succeed in propitiating their good-humour. With the exception of two gentlemen who had been dining out, and were rather noisy in consequence, and evinced a strong inclination occasionally to take a part in the dialogue, all behaved wonderfully well, greeting each performer, as he made his first entrance, with a due amount of cheering; rapturously applauding all the best scenes; laughing (whether at the raciness of the acting, or the grotesque metamorphoses of the actors, made no great difference), and filling up any gap which occurred in the proceedings on the stage, in spite of the prompter, with vociferous encouragement to the
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actor. With an audience so disposed, each successive scene went off better and better. One deserves to be particularised. It was the second in the first act of the comedy; the stage directions for it are as follows:
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Scene--An alehouse room--Several shabby fellows with punch and tobacco; Tony at the head of the table, &c., discovered. Never, perhaps, in any previous representation, was the _mise en scène_ so perfect; it drew three rounds of applause. A very equivocal compliment to ourselves it may be; but such jolly-looking
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as sat round the table at which our Tony presided, were never furnished by the supernumeraries of Drury or Covent Garden. They were as classical, in their way, as Macready's Roman mob. Then there was no make-believe puffing of empty pipes, and fictitious drinking of small-beer for punch; every nose among the audience could appreciate the genuineness of both liquor and tobacco; and the hearty encore which the song, with its stentorian chorus, was honoured with, gave all the parties engaged time to enjoy their punch and their pipes to their satisfaction. It was quite a pity, as was unanimously agreed, when the entrance of Marlow and Hastings, as in duty bound, interrupted so jovial a society. But
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--and so the Three Pigeons' scene, and the play too, came to an end in due course. The curtain fell amidst universal applause, modified only by the urgent request, which, as manager, I had more than once to repeat, that gentlemen would be kind enough to restrain their feelings for fear of disturbing the dons. The house resolved itself into its component elements--all went their ways,--the reading men probably to a Greek play, by way of afterpiece; sleepy ones to bed, and idle ones to their various inventions; and the actors, after the fatigues of the night, to a supper, which was to be the
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It was to take place in one of the men's rooms which happened to be on the same staircase, and had been committed to the charge of certain parties, who understood our notions of an unexceptionable spread. And a right merry party we were, all sitting down in character--Mrs Hardcastle at the top of the table, her worthy partner at bottom, with the
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on each side. It was the best tableau of the evening; pity there was neither artist to sketch, nor spectators to admire it! But, like many other merry meetings, there are faithful portraits of it--proof impressions--in the memories of many who were present, not yet obliterated, hardly even dimmed, by time; laid by, like other valuables, which, in the turmoil of life, we find no time to look at, but not thrown aside or forgotten, and brought out sometimes, in holidays and quiet hours, for us to look at once more, and enjoy their beauty, and feel, after all, how much what we have changed is
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I am now--no matter what. Of my companions at that well-remembered supper, one is a staid and orthodox divine; one a rising barrister; a third a respectable country gentleman, justice of the peace,
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a fourth, they tell me, a semi-Papist: but set us all down together in that same room, draw the champagne corks, and let some Lethe (the said champagne, if you please) wash out all that has passed over us in the last few years, and my word on it, three out of four of us are but boys still; and though much shaving, pearl powder, and carmine, might fail to make of any of the party a heroine of any more delicate class than Meg Merrilies, I have no doubt we could all of us once more smoke a pipe in character at
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The Three Pigeons.