56 The Theatre—Its Literature, and General Arrangement. (JULY, 
are well known to find their finances in a different condition. Now the manager 
has, in good truth (as we have observed already), hardly fair play enough for the 
battle. The fight is too much on the poor fellow in the Lancashire taste; we 
knock him down with a sledge hammer first, and then kick him for falling. He 
suffers the loss of bad houses ;-and bears the blame of them. He is laughed at for 
paying this exhibitor too much, and cursed for offering the other too little. If 
he dismisses an old actor, he is an oppressor and a tyrant; if he refuses to hire 
anew one, he is a miser, and a poltroon, without spirit. The rejected author 
swears that he keeps his house wilfully empty, by playing only some particular 
gentleman’s pieces, out of partiality, and love, and affection. Go into the 
coulisse, and, from the first comedy-lady down to the call-boy, you will hear 
that no manager ever knew what “ love or affection” was at all. Thus, having 
the very population of Pandemonium to manage within doors—for, of all the 
people on earth, popular performers are the most untractable ! (and the women, 
how these are ever dealt with at all, especially those who, like Slippery Sam in the 
Beggar’s Opera, do not think one trade enough, seems little else than a miracle !) 
but, having thus Belzebub’s very crack regiment to manceuvre with within doors, 
and being assailed with squibs from all sides, and on all pretences, from without, 
the poor gentleman—independant of any little natural devotion to the deed—sees 
that fair play has no chance, and comes almost of necessity to try the force of 
alittle Humbug. That he should know what is good seems to tend to nothing, 
because he can only thrive by knowing what it is that the town will like. And, 
that he should know what the town will like, unless by accident, is perfectly 
impossible ; because that is more than, one night after another, the town can 
undertake to know itself. 
LAMENT 
ON THE DEATH OF CARL MARIA VON WEBER. 
Nothing has e’er been told, 
In accents musical and holy, 
To man’s mute ear or to the weary wind, 
Of madness or of melancholy— 
No story in the sophist’s page enroll’d, 
No subtle fancy twined 
With the lone musings of a mateless mind, 
Whose moral may unfold 
Horror and hope—sweet life and frozen death — 
Like that which trembles in the fiual breath 
Of one, whose life was as a spell 
Raised by some genii’s ever-tuneful shell. 
_ The Master of the wild and varied sound, 
From whose creative round 
Spirits of fear and phrenzy started up, 
Where like echoes they had ‘lain— 
Whether in a violet’s cup, 
Or in some pearly palace, which the main 
Had washed too far to find again ;— 
The Wizard of the heart and ear, 
Of Music and Imagination born, 
Hath, like a star that should have met the morn, 
And filled the haunts of heaven with social glee, 
Dropp’d from his high and charmed sphere 
Into the silent sea. 
Life’s chords are snapt by death; and the fine hand 
That filled a mute and marvelling land 
With hurried harmonies, and shadowy things, 
Whose fierce and melancholy wings 
Darken and delight the soul, 
With a strange but sweet control,— 
; 
d 
