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The dean especially would have burked it at once had he suspected its existence. Nor was it fostered, like the former Oxford theatricals to which we have alluded, by royal patronage; we could not, consistently with decorum, request her Majesty to encourage an illegitimate. Nevertheless--spite of its being thus born under the rose, it grew and prospered. Our plan of rehearsal was original. We used to adjourn from dinner to the rooms of one or other of the company; and there, over our wine and dessert, instead of quizzing freshmen and abusing tutors, open each our acting copy, and, with all due emphasis and intonation, go regularly through the scenes of _She Stoops to Conquer_. This was all the study we ever gave to our parts; and even thus it was difficult to get a muster of all the performers, and we had generally to play dummy for some one or more of the characters, or
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them, as the professionals call it. The excuses for absenteeism were various. Mrs Hardcastle and Tony were gone to Woodstock with a team, and were not to be waited for; Diggory had a command to dine with the Principal; and once an interesting dialogue was cut short by the untoward event of Miss Neville's being
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--in consequence of some indiscretion or other--
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It was necessary in our management, as much as in Mr Bunn's or Mr Macready's, to humour the caprices of the stars of the company; but the lesser lights, if they became eccentric at all in their orbits, were extinguished without mercy. Their place was easily supplied; for the moment it became known that a play was in contemplation, there were plenty of candidates for dramatic fame, especially among the freshmen; and though we mortally offended one or two aspiring geniuses, by proffering them the vacant situations of Ralph, Roger, and Co., in Mr Hardcastle's household, on condition of having their respective blue dress-coats turned up with yellow to represent the family livery, there were others to whom the being admitted behind the scenes, even in these humble characters, was a subject of laudable ambition. Nay, unimportant as were some parts in themselves, they were quite enough for the histrionic talent of some of our friends. Till I became a manager myself, I always used to lose patience at the wretched manner in which some of the underlings on the stage went through the little they had to say and do: there seemed no reason why the
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should be so provokingly sticky; and it surprised me that a man who could accost one fluently enough at the stage-door, should make such a bungle as some of them did in a message of some half-dozen words
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But when I first became initiated into the mysteries of amateur performances, and saw how entirely destitute some men were of any notion of natural acting, and how they made a point of repeating two lines of familiar dialogue with the tone and manner, but without the correctness, of a schoolboy going through a task--then it ceased to be any matter of wonder that those to whom acting was no joke, but an unhappily earnest mode of getting bread, should so often make their performance appear the uneasy effort which it is. There was one man in particular, a good-humoured, gentlemanly fellow, a favourite with us all,--not remarkable for talent, but a pleasant companion enough, with plenty of common-sense. Well,
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--it was his own fancy to have a part, and, as he was
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we could not well refuse him. We give him an easy one, for he was not vain of his own powers, or ambitious of theatrical distinction; so he was to be
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--one of Tony's pot-companions. He had but two lines to speak; but from the very first time I heard him read them, I set him down as a hopeless case. He read them as if he had just learned to spell the words; when he repeated them without the book, it was like a clergyman giving out a text. And so it was with a good many of the rank and file of the company; we had more labour to drill them into something like a natural intonation than to learn our own longest speeches twice over. So we made their attendance at rehearsals a _sine qua non_. We dismissed a promising
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Mat Muggins because he went to the
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Union two nights successively, when he ought to have been at
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The Three Pigeons. We superseded a very respectable