direct to me by style and title as such, if thou hast any regard for thy neck. Old Stickleback I had already found as thorny and hedgehog-like as his name; but his family made ample amends, by being as forwardly-complaisant and talkatively-conceited as imperfect mortality could well be. Moreover, they were about to have a private play, to which they invited me, lamenting that we were not sooner acquainted, that I might have taken a part in the same. It was a loss, however, which I assure you I did not at all regret; for, had their plot been "as good a plot as ever was laid," I, at least, have had too much honourable professional labour to resort to such private acting for amusement,-like Placido and the Little Devil, the noted tumblers, who, when visiting the King at Hampton, determined the distance of a pavilion by walking to it on their hands, with their legs upwards, as though their daily antics were not sufficient. But, in the present instance, I devoutly believe that "the gods took care of Cato," and preserved me from the irrecoverable contamination of the Stickleback theatricals.

In reading this account of them, Edmund, I will allow you to call them "Wonderful! wonderful! and most wonderful! and yet again wonderful! and after that, out of all whooping!" Nay, you may think it almost incredible that such things can be, and even say or swear that you could not have believed them had you seen them yourself; but for your life do not question my veracity. "Why should I carry lies about?" or how should the mind of any decent individual ever devise such folly? "I tell thee what, Edmund, if I tell thee a lie, spit in my face, and call me horse!"

At my first visit to Mr. Stickleback's, the day before the performance, I thought the house appeared rather defective in furniture, and in no little confusion; but all surprise at either appearance soon ceased on my being introduced into the room where the play was to be enacted, and beholding the fittings-up, the dresses, and the decorations. I am convinced that hardly a floor was left covered by its respective baize or carpet; that the windows were all despoiled of their curtains, and that the bedsteads were reduced to what sailors call "bare poles," by having resigned their valances, &c. to furnish forth the 'tirings and properties of the entertainments. These, as we were informed by a bill printed with the ordinary hand-types used for marking the household linen, were, "Pizarro; or, the Invasion of Peru; or, the Death of Rolla: a variety of singing and dancing; and the romantic romance of the Blind Boy; or, Rodolph, the Usurping Prince of Sarmatia, and Kalig, the Faithful Courtier !" But before I recount to you the follies of this performance, I ought, in equity to old Stickleback himself, to state that he was entirely ignorant and guiltless of them all, since the whole design was privately concocted between his wife and family, who also took the opportunity of his absence from home to astonish their acquaintance by such a display of taste and talent. "But they are coming to the play: get you a place!"

The proscenium of the stage was formed by the opening of two folding-doors, which, I was assured by Mrs. Stickleback, who appeared to have no little pride and complacency in pointing out the most preposterous of the arrangements, were absolutely taken off their hinges. The space was filled up by an old japanned cornice, and the scarlet festoons of a window-curtain, and a green baize

rather the worse for not a few years' wear, which had been taken up from the room within. But these appointments were by far the most modest and appropriate of the whole. In my own poor notions of such matters, a large table-lamp on each side the stage, and another suspended from the ceiling of the audience-apartment, would have respectably and sufficiently lighted the front. But, no! the Sticklebacks had a soul and conception far beyond such every-day contrivances. When we were all seated in staring and silent expectation, we first heard the steps and loud whisperings and disputings of several persons in the adjoining narrow passage, carrying some large heavy vessel full of liquid, which ever and anon seemed to give a lurch, and then to wash over the edge, to the great dismay of its bearers. At last the curtain was partly raised, and four persons appeared, carrying-mind, I'll swear for the truth of this, whatever you may think,-four persons appeared, carrying a large trough of new bright tin, of sufficient capacity for half a dozen swine to feed at, if they were disposed to be accommodating, three parts filled with lamp-oil, in which were floating a multitude of small pieces of cork, with a lighted wick attached to each! With much labour, and no little spilling of the said oil, these most extraordinary footlights were borne to the front, and set down: but when the prologue came forward, they were found to be so smoky, so offensive and so much in the way,-for the whole machine reached to the middle of his, the said Prologue's legs, that they were at once unanimously voted out, and were removed with the same labour and mischief; their place being then supplied by a row of candles set upon the floor.

I say nothing about the total overthrow of this most delicious invention, which, I fear, from the noise and confusion after its exit, took place in the passage, but pass on now to the performance. I dare say that you can very well imagine both tune and words of the prologue, which was, doubtless, home-made, and quite like the generality of such compositions, having a great deal about "our cause,' and "your applause," without which many persons think an honest prologue cannot be written. There were also divers choice poetical similes, always ending with "thus we to-night;" and in one part the Sticklebacks likened themselves to phoenixes and young eagles, though I thought that magpies or jackdaws would have been by far the more appropriate birds. I felt truly concerned for the young man who delivered this address, because he might have been respectable enough in sound health; but at this time he was far advanced in a most dangerous malady, which has been of late very fatal to many of our acquaintance; that is to say, he was nearly eaten up by conceit and I farther found, as the play proceeded, that all the other actors were deplorably sick of the same disease. This terrible pestilence, Edmund, usually devours its victims downwards, since it first seizes upon some weak part of the head-next it destroys the senses, intoxicates the sight, vanquishes the tongue, advances to the heart, and then the man is lost for ever! avoid it." The principal parts of the drama were of course divided chiefly between the members of the gifted family, each of whom was distinguished by some special peculiarity and striking excellence, which having once seen, there was no mistaking them afterward. Thus,

66

Pray you,

Mr. Cæsar Augustus Stickleback, as Ataliba, had a slight snuffle, and, being something of a negro make and colour, looked, in his stage attire, not unlike the image of a Virginian which had run away from a tobacconist's shop-door. Rolla, Mr. Brutus Stickleback, exasperated the h, and the audience, in every speech; and had a good deal of the bear-garden flourish in his action, which, perhaps, did not quite harmonise with the majestic modesty of the Peruvian leader. Alonzo, Mr. Sebastian Stickleback, could not enunciate his v's and 's without a little previous contortion of his eyes and lips; and his dress was a domino, which had figured at all the fourth-rate masquerades about London for the last quarter of a century. Miss Judith Marcia Stickleback, as Elvira, was, I am persuaded, distinctly heard for three doors off on each side the house, as well as by all who passed it, such was her noble anxiety "to top the part," as Bayes says; whilst the narrow stage appeared too little for either her soul or her body. Little Miss Kitty Stickleback, on the contrary, was so lisping, and mincing, and languishing, as Cora, that one half of her speeches could not be understood, and the remainder were never heard at all.

These were the principals; but a few select friends of similar taste and qualifications were permitted to gather up some scraps of the family glory by personating the inferior characters, or appearing as soldiers, priests, and virgins. Their habits were mostly white night-gowns, or divers-coloured bed-furniture, &c. with huge gilded suns about their necks, which seemed to me very much like those leaden plates that the Sun Fire Office affixes to the houses of its insurers. The weapons were chiefly plain staves, or tin swords; and the shields were made out of the usual substitutes for such properties, namely, the covers of fish-kettles and saucepans. These Mrs. Stickleback herself assured me that her son, Cæsar Augustus, had been at infinite pains in collecting, and also that he had actually caused quite a scarcity of such articles in their vicinity, and their price to rise up to more than double. They were well scoured, and very fiercely painted with what I suppose to be some of "Satan's devices," since I know of no other potentate who could ever have assumed such. The best properties and dresses were, of course, somewhat unequally divided, and few in number, like the liveries of Petruchio's servants;—

"There were none fine but Adam, Ralph, and Gregory;
The rest were ragged, old, and beggarly."

But of all the characters, by far the greatest and grandest personage was Pizarro himself, as right was no doubt. To be sure, a gaudy old Turkish suit, with caftan, calpac and turban, tin crescent, scimitar, &c. were not in the purest style of costume; but then the wearer did so roar, and rant, and strut, and tyrannise, that he must have been worse than a Turk who held him to be a hair's breadth behind Francisco Pizarro himself in those qualities. The performer of this part was a huge black-haired individual, named Josephus Elijah Schmollinger, whom I unwarily supposed to be a German Jew; though Mrs. Stickleback soon enlightened my ignorance, by saying that "some of his family were such, but that Mr. Josephus was as good a Christian as any of themselves, and, having come over to England young, he was thought to speak the tongue as well as

they did." There was no denying assertions so powerfully supported, especially as I was very much of her mind; but how he spake, you will be able to conceive, when I tell you that he sounded a as ah, w as v, and s as she and that thus he pronounced Pizarro's opening speech in the third scene of the third act:-"Vell, capricious idols, Fortunes! be mine ruin thy vork and thy boast. To mineselfs I vill still be true. Yet, ere I fall, grant me thy smiles to prosper in von acts of vengeances; and be that smiles, Alontzo's deaths!"

I shall not try your patience by going all through "the murder of Pizarro," scene by scene, and character by character; for in such cases as this, enough is better than a feast. Some circumstances in the representation, however, struck me as being novel. One was, that instead of Rolla offering the Castilian sentinel a wedge of gold as the bribe for visiting Alonzo, he produced a small pert, cockney-looking, red leather purse, with a tuck, and stamped with the words, "A Trifle from Margate!" In the last scene, too, the high, rude, and hazardous bridge between the lofty rocks, was a long and broad white deal board, not five feet from the floor, so securely planted, that no effort of the Peruvian could push it off the sideboard without the aid of the Spanish soldiers, who very considerately came to his assistance, and who afterwards, with equal consideration, set it up again. The curtain dropped at last, without any other accident than the usual one of leaving Pizarro's body half outside, which was dragged in by its legs and arms.

I was now determined to make my escape as soon as I decently could; but presently came an original epilogue, of about the same merit as the former address, both of which were of the kind mentioned by Bayes, when he says, "I have made a prologue and an epilogue, which may both serve for either; that is, the prologue for the epilogue, or the epilogue for the prologue: nay, they may both serve for any other play as well as this." By the time it was over, Pizarro was so much refreshed as to enter again in the same habit, and roar to us Braham's "Death of Nelson," in the voice of a bassoon, his lower notes and his pronunciation being positively

awful.

""Tvosh in Trafalgar's bay

Ve saw de Frenchmans lay,

Each hearts vos a bounding den!"

After this, which was about half-past eleven o'clock, one of the younger fry of the Sticklebacks, who was considered to be endowed with no little portion of the vis comica, came forward in the habit of a worn-out scarecrow, having his face duly varnished with Brunswick black, to charm the audience with the tasteful melody of " Jim Crow." The next entertainment was to have been Madame Vestris's Savoyard song, by Cora, for which purpose a real hussardressed monkey had been hired from a real Savoyard, and securely tied to a chair in the green-room. About the middle of the second encore of the previous elegant melody of " Jim Crow," however, a loud and hasty knock was heard, at which the performers, who knew that they were acting without the paternal licence, turned pale under their paint, most of the audience fell into consternation, and the hostess started up, exclaiming, "My stars alive! if there arn't Mr. Stickleback, after all!" At the same time, the apartment was ob

served to be rapidly filling with smoke, and a strong smell of fire, from the small adjoining parlour used as a "'tiring-house." In came Mr. Stickleback, truly the Provoked Husband, and in a fitting mood for playing Sir John Brute; and, alarmed at the smoke in the passage, and the noise and confusion everywhere, he rushed at once into the green-room. It was then discovered that the hussar-dressed monkey had been amusing himself by fishing the cork floats out of the oil-trough, which had been carelessly set aside within his reach, with the wicks alight, and throwing them about the room; when they had caught the dress of Ataliba, which he had hastily thrown aside to get ready for his hornpipe.

It was with some difficulty that Mr. Stickleback was prevented from twisting the neck of General Jocko, who, however, wisely escaped in the confusion. A little prompt attention, and a good deal of water, soon put out the fire, and no great mischief was done by it: but as for the oil, dirt, and disorder in the house, " St. Dunstan !" thought I to myself with Gurth the swineherd, "how it must be scraped and cleansed ere it be again fit for a Christian!” All these events have, nevertheless, effected one beneficial end: for I hear that when old Stickleback's passion subsided, he swore roundly that if ever he should find his dwelling so turned out at windows again, he will have his wife indicted for keeping a disorderly house, and send both actors and audience all to the treadmill!

THE BIRD OF PARADISE.

How weak is Matter when compared with Mind!
How slowly does the hand those high thoughts write
Which spirit does so brilliantly indite!

The feeble pen toils sluggishly behind

Those flashing visions of ecstatic light,
That pass before the mind's internal sight,
With all their hues of beauty and of grace!
Before the plodding instrument can trace

A word made up of letters cold and dead,
The dazzling Bird of Paradise has fled,
Or, stripp'd of its fair plumage, drops to earth,
The colours faded from its golden wings.

Oh! I could weep to see such high-born things,
Such flashing thoughts, that are of heavenly birth,
Depart without a record of their worth.

!

O that the Lightnings were my ready pen
What glowing pictures could be written then!

How longs the everlasting mind to tell

Of scenes where seraphs rapt in glory dwell,

Caught ere their colours fade, like dew-drops fair,

That sparkle when the glorious sun is there!

But if a cloud obscure its kindling rays,

Lost are those colours, like the diamond bright;
No longer can the dew-drop sparkling blaze—

It is a drop of common water quite.