1831.] Mrs. Jordan and her Biographer. 55 



than Younge, and far beyond the conception of modern fine ladies, Mrs. 

 Abington remains in memory, as a thing for chance to restore to us 

 rather than design, and revive our polite comedy at the same time." 



Mr. Boaden is mistaken here. The revival of polite comedy will not 

 depend on any performer. The revival of dramatic authorship must be 

 the previous discovery, and until we have polite comedy written, there 

 might be fifty Abingtons playing to empty benches. At York Miss 

 Francis was introduced to Tate Wilkinson, that eternal nuisance of 

 every dramatic biography. The very name makes us sick, and accord- 

 ingly we have a vast deal about this maudlin manager. Here she 

 changed the name of Francis for Jordan, why, is not told, and nobody 

 can care. At Sheffield she had a narrow escape from closing her 

 labours and her fame. The beam of the stage curtain fell within a few 

 feet of her, a weight sufficient to have crushed a whole stage-full of 

 comedians. The opera in which this occurred had a worse fate for the 

 unlucky author Pilon. He had promised to pay the composer ; the 

 opera fell profitless ; the composer demanded his hire, and the author, 

 pennyless, was forced to fly. 



The world has been so often called a stage, that the stage, as if entitled 

 to retaliate, often exhibits a ludicrous " picture in little" of the world. 

 The boards of a country theatre, with its dozen wanderers playing every 

 thing from the king to the lamp-lighter, exhibit as much extravagant am- 

 bition, empty rivalry, bitter vanity, and laborious nothingness, as the 

 most brilliant court in existence. We have thus, en passant, the history 

 of a Mrs. Smith, who ruled and grasped characters with the vigour of a 

 Catherine the Second, seizing provinces from the Grand Turk. Being a 

 wife, she was, from the increase of her progeny, liable to interruptions, 

 which she made hazardously brief, lest a rival actress should appear in 

 any of her favourite parts. Her confinement took place on the 2d of 

 October in a remarkably wet season. The troop were to march on the 

 13th to Sheffield, eighteen miles off. And this Thalestris was so deter- 

 mined to exclude any competitor for the good graces of the Sheffield 

 critics, that she began to exercise daily in a damp garden, in order to 

 qualify herself for the journey. She accomplished one part of her pur- 

 pose, the journey, but paid for it by a lameness in the hip, which threat- 

 ened to disable her for life. The poor creature had now better have 

 gone to bed ; but Mrs. Jordan must, in that case, have been her double ; 

 rather than suffer this triumph, she insisted on playing in the " Clan- 

 destine Marriage," hobbled through it as crippled as Lord Ogleby, and 

 having achieved this point, was rendered by the effort incapable of ap- 

 pearing on the stage for some months after. The personage is not of 

 much historic importance, we will allow. But we presume that the 

 caution was well meant, te under existing circumstances/' and will be 

 attended to upon due occasion. 



Mrs. Jordan was now rising into notice, but opinions differed formi- 

 dably on her powers. Dick Yates, the actor, pronounced at this period, 

 of the three ornaments of the York stage, that Miss Wilkinson (after- 

 wards Mrs. Mountain) was " very pleasing and promising ; Mrs. Brown 

 the height of excellence; and Mrs. Jordan, merely apiece of theatrical 

 mediocrity!" The Siddons herself was not much luckier in her decision; 

 for, on seeing the young actress at York, in 17&5, she said, " She was 

 better where she was, than to venture on the London boards/' The 

 sentence is furiously slipslop, and unworthy of the utterer ; though, 

 perhaps, it was modified by Tate Wilkinson, who transmits it. Of 

 course Mrs. Jordan had no mercy shewn to her in her own theatre ; there, 



