REE.

ALIF COM

RSIT

ITY

'And

before him was brought for judgment,
complaint of prompter, "one of those little.
tawdry things that flirt at the tails of choruses
-the pertest little drab a dirty fringe and ap-
pendage of the lamp's smoke-who, it seems,
on some disapprobation expressed by a 'highly
respectable' audience, had precipitately quitted
her station on the boards and withdrawn her
small talents in disgust. And how dare you,'
said the manager, 'how dare you, madam,
without a notice, withdraw yourself from your
theatrical duties?' 'I was hissed, sir.'
you have the presumption to decide upon the
taste of the town?' 'I don't know that, sir,
but I will never stand to be hissed,' was the
rejoinder of Young Confidence. Then, gather-
ing up his features into one significant mass of
wonder, pity, and expostulatory indignation-
in a lesson never to have been lost upon a
creature less forward than she who stood before
him-his words were these:
these: They have
hissed ME!"'"

It is understood that this argument failed in its effect, for, after all, a hiss is not to be in such wise excused or explained away; its application is far too direct and personal. "Ladies and gentlemen, it was not I that shot the arrow!" said Braham to his audience, when some bungling occurred in the course of his performance of William Tell, and the famous apple remained uninjured upon the head of the hero's

son.

If derision was moved by this bungling,

still more did the singer's address and confession excite the mirth of the spectators. To another singer, failure, or the dread of failure, was fraught with more tragic consequence. For some sixteen years Adolphe Nourrit had been the chief tenor of the Paris Opera House. He had "created" the leading characters in "Robert," "Les Huguenots," "La Juive," "Gustave," and "Masaniello." He resigned his position precipitately upon the advent of Duprez. The younger singer afflicted the elder with a kind of panic. The news that Duprez was among his audience was sufficient to paralyse his powers, to extinguish his voice. He left France for Italy. His success was unquestionable, but he had lost confidence in himself; a deep dejection settled upon him, his apprehension of failure approached delirium. At last he persuaded himself that the applause he won from a Neapolitan audience was purely ironical, was but scoffing ill-disguised. At five in the morning, on the 8th of March, 1839, he flung himself from the window of an upper floor, and was picked up in the street quite dead. Poor Nourrit! he was a man of genius in his way; but for him there would have been no grand duet in the fourth act of "Les Huguenots," no cavatini for Eleazar in "La Juive;" and to his inventiveness is to be ascribed the ballet of "La Sylphide," which Taglioni made so famous.

It is odd to hear of an actor anxious for

66

The

goose," and disappointed at not obtaining it. Yet something like this happened once during the O.P. riots. Making sure that there would be a disturbance in the theatre, Mr. Murray, one of John Kemble's company, thought it needless to commit his part to memory; he was so certain that he should not be listened to. But the uproar suddenly ceased; there was a lull in the storm. actor bowed, stammered, stared, and was what is called in the language of the theatre "dead stuck." However, his mind was soon at ease; to do him justice the audience soon hissed him to his heart's content, and perhaps even in excess of that measure. Subsequently he resolved, riot or no riot, to learn something of his part.

CHAPTER XVII.

EPILOGUES.

EPILOGUES went out of fashion with pig-tails, the public having at last decided that neither of these appendages was really necessary or particularly ornamental; but a very considerable time elapsed before this opinion was definitively arrived at. The old English moralities or moral plays usually concluded, as Mr. Payne Collier notes, with an epilogue in which prayers were offered up by the actors for the king, queen, clergy, and sometimes for the commons; the latest instance of this practice being the epilogue to a play of 1619, "Two Wise Men and All the Rest Fools." "It resteth now," says the "epiloguiser," "that we render you very humble and hearty thanks, and that all our hearts pray for the king and his family's enduring happiness, and our country's perpetual welfare. Si placet, plaudite." So also the dancer entrusted with the delivery of the epilogue to Shakespeare's "Second Part of King Henry IV." may be

understood as referring to this matter, in the concluding words of his address: "My tongue is weary; when my legs are too, will bid you good-night and so kneel down before you but, indeed, to pray for the queen. And to this old custom of loyal prayer for the reigning sovereign has been traced the addition of the words, "Vivat rex," or "Vivat regina," which were wont to appear in the playbills, until quite recent times, when our programmes became the advertising media of the perfumers.

The main object of the epilogue, however, was as Massinger has expressed it in the concluding address of his comedy, "Believe as You List".

The end of epilogues is to enquire

The censure of the play, or to desire
Pardon for what's amiss.

Sometimes a sort of bluntness of speech was affected, as in the epilogue to one of Beaumont and Fletcher's comedies:

Why there should be an epilogue to a play
I know no cause. The old and usual way

For which they were made was to entreat the grace
Of such as were spectators. In this place

And time, 'tis to no purpose; for I know,

What you resolve already to bestow
Will not be altered, whatsoe'er I say
In the behalf of us, and of the play;
Only to quit our doubts, if you think fit,
You may or cry it up or silence it.

It was in order, no doubt, the more to conciliate the audience that epilogues assumed, oftentimes, a playfulness of tone that would