———————SE———— ee 
1826,] 
who, upwards of seventy. years of age, 
yalked the streets of Dublin unremarked, 
in the old dress worn in’ the days of 
Charles 1J.—I was acquainted with two 
brothers in Dublin College, James and 
Edward D—; they both took orders; 
their sister Mary was a most beautiful 
creature, very fair, blue eyes, amd flaxen 
ringlets, a celebrated belle. I saw her 
dance at the Castle, one 4th of Jane (the 
. late King’s birth-day) ; her dress white, her 
lovely person adorned with white rose- 
buds.—I knew Counsellor Leonard Mac 
Nally when a boy. Mrs. Mac Nally, his 
mother, was one of the finest persons of 
a woman {a droll phrase] lever saw. Leo- 
nard himself was much under size [ano- 
ther]; he was a sprightly boy, and had a 
passion for plays.’"—But who was he?— 
Editor of the Ledger, a London paper ; 
and very indulgent,” says O’ Keefe, ‘to my 
pieces, as they appeared. ‘Tired of lite- 
rary fagging, he returned to Dublin, and 
pursued his profession ofa barrister.” (By 
the way, page 46, we are yery carefully in- 
formed, notwithstanding, that what is a 
barrister in England is called counsellor in 
Treland; the word barrister is not known 
there.) Leonard Mac Nally excelled all his 
contemporaries in keen and sarcastic wit.— 
‘Then we have Counsellorand Mrs. Costello, 
and Sir Toby Butler—all lawyers, Mrs. C. 
and all—well known in their day in Dub- 
lin ; but of whom he has really nothing to tell 
worth relating. They serve to add to the 
bead-rol! .of names, Sir Toby’s bottle of 
wine, which he poured into a loaf and 
ate, to eyade a promise not to drink, we have 
had oyer and over again; and is as poor a 
story as can well be told. The anecdotes, in- 
deed, are singularly deficient in pith and 
point—generally vulgar—and many of them 
of the lowest order of green-room puns and 
tayern jests. 
The Recollections , of his boyhood, re- 
lating as they do to persons who then 
figured on the stage of life, though mainly 
confined to a description of their persons 
vand dresses, are better than those of his 
Ziper years—for they are all of the theatre. 
Two-thirds of the yolumes are occupied 
-with the successive histories of his stage 
es, written in a long dramatic career of 
more than fifty. years, the greater part of 
»which were eminently successful in their 
day—frequently commanded by. royalty— 
_amatter on which he lays prodigious stress 
rand some few of which are still occa- 
sionally, we . believe, before the public. 
-These details are wearisome beyond all 
_endurance, Of what ufility is it, or whom 
will it amuse, to be told, for instance, that 
ythe ‘ Agreeable Surprise’ was received with 
@yToar.of applause when Edwin got up 
Ip, the window and vociferated—‘ stand out 
ine ey, Domine Felix, till Rusty Fusty 
“shoots the Attorney ;’ or that the ‘ Ban- 
‘ditti’ was damned the first night, re-written 
in. three weeks, and damned again, not by 
‘the audience, but by the players - one and 
Domestic and Foreign. 
651, 
all throwing up their parts in despair— 
paying their forfeits ?—and finally repro- 
duced, with some modifications, under the 
title of the ‘Castle of Andalusia,’ and re- 
ceived with unbounded approbation? Of 
what utility or amusement, we ask, is all 
this detail, when the piece has vanished, 
and never will be heard of again? The 
* Man-Milliner’—one event. at least worth 
recording—was dismissed by the audience 
as soon as the curtain rose. The an- 
nouncement was a signa] for a general rise 
of the trade; the haberdashers from the 
four winds of heaven, shut up their shops 
at three o’clock, and thronged to the 
theatre to crush, at a blow, the anticipated 
mockery. After all, we believe, the piece 
Was quite without ‘offence.’ Names are 
things, and dramatists should look to their 
titles. Townly’s ‘ High-life below Stairs’ 
occasioned great tumults in its day, of which 
Garrick, however, cunningly took adyan- 
tage, O'Keefe tells us, to exclude the 
servants from the galleries, and make the 
gallery a pay-place. 
Five or six provoking and harassing 
hours did we spend over these barren 
volumes—turning over leaf after leaf, and 
never meeting with fruit, the value of a 
fig, to exhilarate the dreary course; not 
once were we tempted to smile. The 
only two or three tolerable jokes had ran 
the gauntlet of the public prints’ some 
months ago, and now met our eyes with 
the flatness of a twice-told tale. The 
yolumes terminate with a string of in- 
scriptions, in rhyme, written for the 
portraits of several performers painted 
at Mr. Harris’s expense, by Gainsborough 
Dupont. ‘They have never appeared in 
print before,’ and are indeed ten thousand 
fathoms deep below the lowest depths of 
contempt. 
O‘Keefe’s own story is soon told. He 
was born in Dublin in 1747, and descended 
from ancestors who were once of impor- 
tance, in King’s County and Wexford— 
Kings of course—and he himself used, it 
seems, a regal crown in his armorial bear- 
ings. Destined for an artist, in his very 
childhood he was entered as a pupil at 
the Royal Academy of Dublin—At eight, 
he says, ‘ I drew very prettily’—and spent 
some years in the practice of his profession, 
painting numerous portraits. He was early 
struck with a passion for the stage, andin Ire- 
land appears to have been for some time a 
performer, and sometimes a manager. This 
we do not learn from any direct statement ; 
but the fact may be gathered from his fre- 
quent talk of green-rooms and rehearsals ; 
from the incidental mention ofan engagement 
with Sheridan, from which Sheridan wished 
to escape ; and finally from a letter of Tate 
Wilkinson’s, in which he inquires of O’ Keefe 
on what terms he would part with the lease 
of a theatre. Very early in life he com- 
menced writing for the stage, and brought 
out his pieces—to the amount of sixty. 
ra Py the Haymarket and Covent-Gar- 
oO 
