560 The Modern Tantalus ; or, [Nov. 



more pleasant and graceful in our eyes, could we have learned that they 

 had evinced any gentleness of heart and kindling of sympathy touching 

 this matter. But surely the notion just breaks upon us surely he 

 must have had benefits of his own ! Of a verity he has had such within 

 our recollection. " Mr. M.'s night" has more than once struck upon 

 our optics in scarlet characters, dazzling and decoying us. What ! 

 invite his friends to a feast whereof he declines to partake himself ! 

 Provide all the delicacies of the season (the phrase applies to the theatre 

 as well as to the table) and taste not of a dish ! ff Hast thou given all 

 to thy two daughters, and art thou come to this ?" 



As we listened to him afterwards, we thought there was a pathos 

 mingled with his pleasantry, a magnanimity in his air, that we had 

 never observed before. With the strong light of the lamp reflected upon 

 him, he looked like the Man in the Moon. We had once likened him, 

 in the sportiveness of fancy, to a sort of human " toad-in-a-hole ;" but he 

 now seemed to us, as he sate there in his lonely and desolate nook, greater 

 than Diogenes in his tub. 



Such were the first impressions which his extraordinary announce- 

 ment created within us. We reflected upon the dreary term of his 

 exclusion FORTY YEARS ! What a non-life must he have led ! The 

 situation of Sterne's " Captive" came dimly upon our recollection. We 

 brought him in idea before our eyes. Our unhappy, ill-used, inadmis- 

 sible friend resembled him ; his was a parallel case. " He had seen no 

 Kean, no Farren, in all that time ; nor had the voice of Tree or Ste- 

 phens breathed through his lattice. Grimaldi but here our heart 



began to bleed." We could not read over the list, or calculate the extent 

 of his sacrifices, without feeling that he had suffered a worse than 

 cloistered seclusion. He had been knocking, like a true Catholic, at the 

 gate of Parliament for forty years, and still it remained most perse- 

 veringly closed. Two revolutions had taken place in France during 

 that period ; yet his destiny seemed as despotic as ever. 



Too busied with these emotions and reflections to enter the theatre, 

 we returned home. There, however, musing upon mysteries of all 

 kinds, our feelings gradually rolled back into their former channel. The 

 confession of that night tended to confirm our past suspicions. We 

 remembered his extraordinary communications ; his narrative of events 

 witnessed at the same instant in several places ; his rumours, whispers, 

 hints, and inuendos, concerning facts, a knowledge whereof could only 

 have been obtained by a power of ubiquity, that must have been pur- 

 chased at a price which the Archbishop of Canterbury could never have 

 repaid. This spiritual admission then appeared to account for his cor- 

 pore.al exclusion. To what end should he seek to enter a theatre, when 

 all its secrets were open to his view ? Why should he trouble himself 

 to dress for the Opera, when he could see Pasta from that magic box- 

 the only one in which he could ever have occasion to take a place ? 

 Why should he pay for admission to the pit, when in the one which hath 

 no bottom he had found the means of looking through lobby- walls, and 

 making green curtains more transparent than glass ? Besides, could a 

 mere mortal, accustomed to yield and unfitted to resist, ever have with r 

 stood the temptation to which he had been nightly exposed for many 

 years? Would not a creature like man, liable to fun and frailty of all 

 kinds, have watched his opportunity and slipped in some night at the 

 latter end of a farce ? Could we could the reader have resisted ? Alas ! 



