intimate with him. This was Thomas Hilson, so well known in America for his histrionic talents. To Hilson, Spiffard communicated his desire to tread the stage for amusement, and Tom promised him a trial.

"What part shall it be?" "Alexander the Great."

“Oh, no, no,—you are not up to that by a foot." "Alexander was not tall."

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Always six feet on the stage. Suppose you try Scrub ?". Never was poor hero more cut down. By way of compromise, it was at length decided that he should play Young Norval, and appear as Caleb Quotem in the farce.

The important night came. Zeb exerted his heroics and pathetics manfully; he was very serious, and the audience very merry. At length he died, to the great relief of the company, who applauded long and loud. The mist which besets young actors on first appearances, and had enveloped Zeb's mental faculties, during the tragedy, was not fully dispelled, but he had an awkward kind of uncomfortable notion that all was not as it ought to be in his reception. Hilson assisted to prepare him for Caleb. The tragedians of the company complimented him on his success in Norval, with as much sincerity as if they belonged to a regular Theatre Royal. Hilson said nothing on the subject. The farce began, and if the audience laughed at the tragedy, they laughed ten times more with the comedy of the new performer. But when he gave the songs, the plaudits were so dissimilar from those Young Norval had received, that the mist was dispelled, and Zeb saw plainly that he was no tragedian-at least in the opinion of his auditors. He felt that his powers for creating merriment and delighting by song, were rapturously acknowledged by all. Hilson shook him by the hand, and without any of that paltry feeling which rivalry is supposed to generate among artists of all descriptions, welcomed the yankee as a brother, and true son of Thalia.

This was our hero's golden age-his days were couleur de rose, and the intoxication of applause rendered his nights, if not peaceful, yet pleasant. No other intoxication had charms for him. He drank water, to the astonishment of his male companions; and the ladies thought him utterly devoid of feeling. He never saw the preparations for riot or revelry, or witnessed its effects, without thinking of his father's house; or looked on the smiles which were meant to allure, but that the desolation he had witnessed at Stamford, was shadowed to his imagination. The egis of Minerva presented an image which

turned the beholder to stone. The images impressed upon Spiffard at home, and in Lincolnshire, made memory an ægis against the assaults of vice. The conduct of his grandfather and youngest aunt, in respect to the lost daughter and sister, had appeared mysterious to him, and although he had not pryed into that which they did not think fit to reveal, he, since, had recollected circumstances and words, which to his quick mind, told the tale of a sorrow worse than poverty or disease can inflict.

News from home was tardy in arriving. Spiffard's money was exhausted. His uncle's banker would advance no more. He found himself under the necessity of playing for bread, instead of playing for amusement. Once more he tried his tragic powers. He was permitted to appear at one of the great Theatres Royal, (not yet like all royals, shorn of their beams,) in Othello: but he was overwhelmed by an Iago of six feet. It was remembered that Garrick had declined Othello, for fear of being compared to a black pompey handing the tea-kettle, and that he had refused to play to Barry's Iago, thinking he might be said to bully the monument. Spiffard was condemned for want of height, by those who were in raptures at the physical and mental powers of the baby actors who wielded the broad-sword or bullied the towering Palmers, Popes, and Barrymores of the stage. Again the comic powers and the musical skill of our hero rescued him from utter failure, and he went down to the provincial theatres as a star, though not suffered to shine permanently in that heaven of the English theatrical systemLondon.

It is not my intention to follow our hero from Bath to Bristol, from Manchester to Liverpool. We are principally concerned in his adventures and his fate in America. We only wish to account for the uncommon success of a yankee greenmountain boy, on the metropolitan stage of New York, where we found him one of the principal low comedians, at the opening of our story, which we now hasten to pursue for the gratification of our impatient readers. But we shall have to show how his expected fortune vanished,-how he became permanently an actor, and the husband of the lady who made him as happy as he appeared to be at the commencement of our memoir, by the gift of her hand.

The first is a very short story, and the second not much longer. Most of my readers will remember how often hope has been disappointed; and many a Benedict will bear me out in the assertion that there are those who say they will live ba

chelors, and only keep their promise-until they are married. Our hero feared the fate of his father: but no person on earth was less like his mother than Mrs. Trowbridge: the towering in person and thought, the high-minded, fire-eyed, black-browed Mrs. Trowbridge.

As to fortune, we Americans know that men become rich or poor as quickly as a scene changes at a theatre from a palace to a prison at the slap of a Harlequin's sword. Zeb's riches were only in expectancy; and such are of the least substantial kind. You, Mr. Broker, expected to make ten thousand dollars by the rise of stocks: they fell, and you lost what you never had. You, young gentleman, expected a fortune at the death of your father, and lo! he is a bankrupt. And you, Madam, the lovely mother of those two fine boys, though your husband possessed millions, you live to see them dependantperhaps happily-on their own exertions for bread. Our heros' fortune was lost to him by the simple circumstance, that his good old uncle Abraham, who had deferred making that will which was to make his nephew rich, died unexpectedly, like a great many other old men, although every step he took might have warned him that he was tottering to the tomb. He died unexpectedly of apoplexy, though neither fat nor short-necked, and his property devolved on his brother. This would have been no source of grief to the right-minded Zebediah, if that brother (his father) could have been made happier thereby; but his mother, who had been partially restored to health by the skilful Doctor Woodward, and the benevolent Mr. Wilford, sunk under the loss of children who were the victims of her misconduct; and her husband lived but two weeks after herjust long enough to make him the legal heir of his brother, and thereby deprive his son of the inheritance. He had been induced to buy lands on credit, to a great amount, in a cold and barren northern region of the State of New York; he had borrowed money to a large amount on interest; his property had been so neglected of late years, that even the estate left by his brother was insufficient to satisfy his creditors; and his son, instead of being a man of independent fortune, was only an independent man. Independent he was, as he possessed youth, health, habits of temperance, and a profession for which he was well qualified.

When Mr. Thomas Apthorpe Cooper went to England in search of recruits for the New York theatre, his experienced eye and ear determined him to engage Spiffard, whom he found starring it at Liverpool. The success of the comedian was

great at New York, his love of tragedy led him to become an admirer of Mrs. Trowbridge. Her talents in her profession, her decided manner, her ready wit, added to her known approbation of his efforts as an actor, fixed him as a lover of the lady, and then,—but what need we say more, after saying that he was a lover? He was blind, and his blindness, added to a naturally confiding disposition, brought them to that precise situation in which we found them in the month of October, in the year eighteen hundred and eleven, when we introduced them to the reader.

Between the time of Spiffard's return to America, and his marriage, the manager of the New York theatre had sent out George Frederick Cooke, had come back to the United States himself, had enriched the theatrical world with Hilson-and many other events, in the real and mimic world, had occurred, of which we say nothing, and perhaps know as little as we say. We gladly return to the point at which we left the actors in our drama, and now pursue our story with as few deviations as the nature of the case (and the information necessary to be imparted to our readers) will permit.

CHAPTER XII.

We come back to the starting place-A scene behind the

curtain.

"No epilogue, I pray you; for your play needs no excuse."

"This palpable-gross play hath well beguiled the heavy gait of night." "As I do live by food, I met a fool."

"Call me not fool till heaven hath sent me fortune."

"Since the little wit that fools have, was silenced, the little foolery that wise men have, makes a great noise."

"O this learning, what a thing it is!"-Shakspeare.

A HOPELESS task is before us. We have a long tale to tell, and no chance, that we yet see, of introducing any duke, marquis, earl, baron, or even knight, into our pages. True, even princes have travelled through our republican land, and

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other worthies, from dukes to M. P's. but we never fell in with them. We had no dinners to give, nor palaces to show. And in truth, we felt ashamed of our fellow-citizens, when we saw them running after, courting, and cringing, to creatures, merely because exalted by institutions whose injustice they, (as well as every other well-informed man,) abhor. We fear, gentle reader, that our story must depend upon its moral worth, and the interest it may create, without any showing-off of the higher orders of European society. We have not even a colonel or a captain to help us.;, that is, one who is a hireling in a monarch's service. As to an officer who only serves God and his country-pah! we might as well talk of a police officer. We shall speak of as many foreigners as natives, and represent them as we find them; good and bad, like ourselves; but all untitled. It is a curious fact, that the greatest and best foreigner that ever visited America, abjured the title inherited from his ancestors: keeping that, he had earned in defence of the rights of man.

It was in the evening of that same day, in October, 1811, which we have chosen as the time of commencing this history, and near upon the stroke of six, by the clock of St. Paul's chapel, that two inferior actors in life's drama (and ours,) sat earnestly conversing in the dressing-room appropriated to George Frederick Cooke, up the stairs formerly described, in the rear of the Park Theatre. These members of my dramatis personæ were, the one, a tall, raw-boned, pale, native of Massachusetts, who having been in London and Paris, and often speaking of his perils by land and water, was called by the inmates of the theatre, "the Yankee traveller"—by himself, Mr. Cooke's valet de sham. The other, a short, square, red-faced, Hibernian, who had found his way from Dublin to the new world, in the capacity of a hair-dresser, was at this time a naturalized citizen, and entertained no doubts but America would soon, as it ought, be governed by the "ould country folk" from Ireland.

We have slightly noticed these persons before, but they are deserving of a more formal introduction to the reader of this tragi-comic-historical-memoir : tragi-comic because natural; for unmingled mirth or sorrow is not of this world.

The "Yankee traveller" had made a successful voyage to the West Indies, and in the true spirit of enterprise, had followed up his success, by investing all the proceeds of his sales (of wooden ware,) in oranges; and shipping them, with himself as supercargo, for London. The "venture" failed. Trustworthy Davenport found himself, as he used to say, “tarnationly swampt." The oranges having proved more liable to the