him, amounts to a Platonic idea. He understands a leg of mutton in its quiddity. He stands wondering, amid the commonplace materials of life, like primeval man with the sun and stars about him.

5

XXI. MUNDEN'S FAREWELL

THE regular playgoers ought to put on mourning, for the king of broad comedy is dead to the drama ! Alas! Munden is no more! - give sorrow vent. He may yet walk the town, pace the pavement in a seeming existence drink, and nod to his friends in all the affectation of life Munden, who with the bunch

10 but Munden,

the Munden!

eat,

of countenances, the bouquet of faces, is gone for ever from the lamps, and, as far as comedy is concerned, is as dead as Garrick ! When an actor retires (we will put the suicide as mildly as possible) how many worthy persons perish with him! 15 — With Munden, — Sir Peter Teazle must experience a shock

Sir Robert Bramble gives up the ghost Crack ceases to breathe. Without Munden what becomes of Dozey? Where shall we seek Jemmy Jumps? Nipperkin and a thousand of such admirable fooleries fall to nothing, and the departure 20 therefore of such an actor as Munden is a dramatic calamity. On the night that this inestimable humourist took farewell of the public, he also took his benefit: - a benefit in which the public assuredly did not participate. The play was Coleman's Poor Gentleman, with Tom Dibdin's farce of Past Ten o'clock. 25 Reader, we all know Munden in Sir Robert Bramble, and Old Tobacco complexioned Dozey; we all have seen the old hearty baronet in his light sky-blue coat and genteel cocked hat; and we have all seen the weather-beaten old pensioner, Dear Old Dozey, tacking about the stage in that intense blue 30 sea livery- drunk as heart could wish, and right valorous in

memory. On this night Munden seemed like the Gladiator "to rally life's whole energies to die," and as we were present at this great display of his powers, and as this will be the last opportunity that will ever be afforded us to speak of this admirable performer, we shall "consecrate," as Old John 5 Buncle says, "a paragraph to him."

The house was full,-full!-pshaw! that's an empty word! The house was stuffed, crammed with people crammed from the swing door of the pit to the back seat in the banished one shilling. A quart of audience may be said 10 (vintner-like, may it be said) to have been squeezed into a pint of theatre. Every hearty play-going Londoner, who remembered Munden years agone, mustered up his courage and his money for this benefit- and middle-aged people were therefore by no means scarce. The comedy chosen for 15 the occasion, is one that travels a long way without a guard; it is not until the third or fourth act, we think, that Sir Robert Bramble appears on the stage. When he entered, his reception was earnest, noisy, outrageous, waving of hats and handkerchiefs, deafening shouts, clamorous beating of 20

sticks, all the various ways in which the heart is accustomed to manifest its joy were had recourse to on this occasion. Mrs. Bamfield worked away with a sixpenny fan till she scudded only under bare poles. Mr. Whittington wore out the ferule of a new nine-and-sixpenny umbrella. 25 Gratitude did great damage on the joyful occasion.

The old performer, the veteran, as he appropriately called himself in the farewell speech, was plainly overcome; he pressed his hands together, he planted one solidly on his breast, he bowed, he sidled, he cried! When the noise 30 subsided (which it invariably does at last) the comedy proceeded, and Munden gave an admirable picture of the rich, eccentric, charitable old bachelor baronet, who goes about with Humphrey Dobbin at his heels, and philanthropy in his

heart. How crustily and yet how kindly he takes Humphrey's contradictions! How readily he puts himself into an attitude for arguing! How tenderly he gives a loose to his heart on the apprehension of Frederick's duel. In truth he played 5 Sir Robert in his very ripest manner, and it was impossible not to feel in the very midst of pleasure regret that Munden should then be before us for the last time.

In the farce he became richer and richer; Old Dozey is a plant from Greenwich. The bronzed face- and neck to 10 match - the long curtain of a coat-the straggling white hair the propensity, the determined attachment to grog, are all from Greenwich. Munden, as Dozey, seems never to have been out of action, sun, and drink. He looks (alas he looked) fireproof. His face and throat were dried like a 15 raisin, and his legs walked under the rum-and-water with all the indecision which that inestimable beverage usually inspires. It is truly tacking, not walking. He steers at a table, and the tide of grog now and then bears him off the point. On this night, he seemed to us to be doomed to fall in action, and 20 we therefore looked at him, as some of the Victory's crew are said to have gazed upon Nelson, with a consciousness that his ardour and his uniform were worn for the last time. In the scene where Dozey describes a sea fight, the actor never was greater, and he seemed the personification of an old seventy25 four! His coat hung like a flag at his poop! His phiz was not a whit less highly coloured than one of those lustrous visages which generally superintend the head of a ship! There was something cumbrous, indecisive, and awful in his veerings! Once afloat, it appeared impossible for him to come to his 30 moorings; once at anchor, it did not seem an easy thing to get him under weigh!

The time, however, came for the fall of the curtain, and for the fall of Munden! The farce of the night was finished. The farce of the long forty years' play was over! He stepped

forward, not as Dozey, but as Munden, and we heard him address us from the stage for the last time. He trusted, unwisely we think, to a written paper. He read of "heart-felt recollections," and "indelible impressions." He stammered, and he pressed his heart, — and put on his spectacles, and 5 blundered his written gratitudes, and wiped his eyes, and bowed - and stood, - and at last staggered away for ever! The plan of his farewell was bad, but the long life of excellence which really made his farewell pathetic, overcame all defects, and the people and Joe Munden parted like levers! Well! 10 Farewell to the Rich Old Heart! May thy retirement be as full of repose, as thy public life was full of excellence! We must all have our farewell benefit in our turn.

XXII. A CHAPTER ON EARS

I HAVE NO ear.

Mistake me not, reader,

nor imagine that I am by nature 15 destitute of those exterior twin appendages, hanging ornaments and (architecturally speaking) handsome volutes to the human capital. Better my mother had never borne me. I am, I think, rather delicately than copiously provided with those conduits; and I feel no disposition to envy the mule for his 20 plenty, or the mole for her exactness, in those ingenious labyrinthine inlets those indispensable side-intelligencers.

Neither have I incurred, or done anything to incur, with Defoe, that hideous disfigurement, which constrained him to draw upon assurance to feel " quite unabashed," and at 25 ease upon that article. I was never, I thank my stars, in the pillory; nor, if I read them aright, is it within the compass of my destiny, that I ever should be.

When therefore I say that I have no ear, you will understand me to mean-for music.- To say that this heart never 30

melted at the concourse of sweet sounds, would be a foul selflibel. "Water parted from the sea" never fails to move it strangely. So does "In infancy." But they were used to be sung at her harpsichord (the old-fashioned instrument in vogue 5 in those days) by a gentlewoman- the gentlest, sure, that ever merited the appellation the sweetest - why should I hesitate to name Mrs. S-, once the blooming Fanny Weatheral of the Temple who had power to thrill the soul of Elia, small imp as he was, even in his long coats; and to 10 make him glow, tremble, and blush with a passion, that not faintly indicated the day-spring of that absorbing sentiment, which was afterwards destined to overwhelm and subdue his nature quite, for Alice W

-n.

I even think that sentimentally I am disposed to harmony. 15 But organically I am incapable of a tune. I have been practising "God save the King" all my life; whistling and humming of it over to myself in solitary corners; and am not yet arrived, they tell me, within many quavers of it. Yet hath the loyalty of Elia never been impeached.

20

I am not without suspicion that I have an undeveloped faculty of music within me. For, thrumming, in my wild way, on my friend A.'s piano, the other morning, while he was engaged in an adjoining parlour, on his return he was pleased to say, "he thought it could not be the maid!" On 25 his first surprise at hearing the keys touched in somewhat an airy and masterful way, not dreaming of me, his suspicions had lighted on Jenny. But a grace snatched from a superior refinement, soon convinced him that some being, - technically perhaps deficient, but higher informed from a principle 30 common to all the fine arts, had swayed the keys to a

-

mood which Jenny, with all her (less-cultivated) enthusiasm, could never have elicited from them. I mention this as a proof of my friend's penetration, and not with any view of disparaging Jenny.