1 830.] The Demon of Drury-lane. 559 



great energy still yes, it is the true light, although it may not burn so 

 brilliantly as it did once." I inquired if he had seen all that actor's 

 early performances. " No/' he observed, very calmly, and with the air 

 of a man who is perfectly innocent of a jest j " no, / never saw Kean 

 act in my life !" Let the reader imagine a reply to this declaration. 

 " You don't say so !" died on our tongue ; not a single " indeed !" 

 escaped from our lips. This was no case for starts and exclamations ; 

 our emotions were too deep for interjections. It was not until he had 

 reiterated the assertion, in very positive terms, that we felt quite con- 

 vinced he was in earnest. We then summoned up all the emphasis in 

 our power. " Is it possible that you have attended this theatre every 

 night for so many years, and have you really never seen Kean?" 

 " Never in my life," replied our eccentric friend ; " in fact, I HAVE 



NOT SEEN A PLAY OR A FARCE FOR THESE FORTY YEARS !" 



If a physician had told us that he had not prescribed for himself for 

 the period mentioned ; if an author had protested that he had not read 

 one word of his ow r n works for half a century ; if a champagne-manu- 

 facturer had taken upon himself to say that he had never tasted his own 

 liquid in his life ; in any such cases we should not have felt a moment's 

 surprise. We should have perceived immediately that they had a motive 

 for their self-denial. But here there was none. The circumstance we 

 have recorded is probably without parallel. To have been for years 

 steeped to the very lips, another Tantalus, in the delights of Drury-lane, 

 without tasting a single drop ! To have had the fruit bobbed to his lips 

 for forty years ! To have grown old in the service of the stage, and 

 yet never to have advanced further than the threshold of the theatre ! 

 To have had the door of it perpetually shut in his face ! To have been 

 the nightly medium of administering gratuitous pleasures to others, and 

 never to have had his own name placed on the free-list ! To have stood 

 so long within sight of the promised land, without the possibility of reach- 

 ing it ! To have seen myriads of happy, white-gloved people pass into 

 the theatre, dreaming of nothing but delight yet to have been left 

 behind, shut up in that Pandora's box of his, and to feel that there was 

 no hope at the bottom of it ! Is there not something touching some- 

 thing that amounts to a kind of ludicrous melancholy, in all this ? There 

 are nights when the free-list is suspended our friend's office on these 

 occasions is a sinecure. Surely then he might have been passed in at 

 a private door. Was it liberal, was it even common humanity, thus to 

 close the gates against him ? to keep him waiting for forty years ; until 

 either the stream, or his inclination to cross it, had passed by ! If he 

 had only gone in at half-price, it would, as Yorick observes, have been 

 something. 



Again, on benefit-nights. Was there no one to present him with a 

 single ticket even for the gallery ? Is all fellow-feeling and gratitude 

 utterly driven from Drury-lane ? Are the " charitable and humane" 

 nowhere to be discovered among the professors of the dramatic art? 

 There is Mr. Kean, who is so renowned for liberality, and who has 

 taken benefits, though not lately we are astonished at him. Even 

 Munden might, in such a case as this, have ventured upon an act of 

 munificence that would have cost him nothing. Suppose he had sold 

 him a pit-ticket, as they are offered to us at the doors of some of the 

 theatres, for " eighteen-pence." Really, this could not have hurt him. 

 There are one or two of the actresses, also, who would have looked still 



