Extracts.

Lyttelton Times, Volume VIII, Issue 538, 30 December 1857, Page 3

Extracts.

WHAT WILL HE DO T^ITH IT ? BY. PISISTRATUS CAXTON.

(From JßlpckwaoA]* Magazine.)

BOOK I.

CHAPTEB I. In which the History opens with a description of the Social Manners, Habits, arid Amusements of the English people, as exhibited in an immemorial National.Festivity.—Characters to be commenced in the History, introduced and graphically portrayed, with a nasoldgical illustration.—Original suggestions as to the idiosyncrasies engendered by trades and callings, with other matters worthy of note, conveyed in artless dialogue after the manner of Herodotus, Father of History. (Mother unknown.)

It was a summer fair in one of the prettiest' villages in Surrey. The main street was lined with booths, abounding- in toys, gleaning crockery, gay ribbons, and gilded gingerbread, farther on, where the street widened into the ample villagegreen, rose the more pretending fabrics which lodged the attractive forms of the " Mermaid, the. Norfolk Giant, the Pigfaced Lady, the Spotted. Boy, and the - Calf, with Two Heads; while high over even these edifices, and occupying the most conspicuous vantage-ground, a lofty stage, promised to rural play-goers the ' Grand Melo-dramatic Performance of the Remorseless Baron and the Bandit's Child.' Music, lively if artless, resounded on every side; —drums, fifes, pennywhistles, cat-calls, and a hand-organ played by a dark foreigner, from the height of whose shoulder a cynical but observant monkey eyed the hubbub and cracked his nuts. It was now sunset —the throng at the fullest—an animated joyous scene. The day had been sultry; no clouds were to be seen, except low on the western horizon, where they stretched, in lengthened ridges of gold and purple, like the borderland between earth and sky. The tall elms on the green were still, save, near i the great stage, one or two, upon which young urchins had climbed : and their laughing faces peered forth, here and there, from the foliage trembling under their restless movements. Amidst the crowd, as it streamed saunteringly along, were two spectators — strangers to the place, as was notably proved by the attention they excited, and the broad jokes their dress and appearance provoked from the rustic wite,—jokes which they took with amused goodhumour, and sometimes, retaliated with a .zest which had already, made them very popular personages; indeed, there was ; that about them ,which propitiated liking. They were young, and the freshness of enjoyment was so visible in their faces, that it begot a sympathy, and wherever they went, other faces brightened round them.

One of the two whom we have thus individualized was of that enviable age, "ranging; from fiverand-twenty to seven-and-twenty, in which, if a man cannot contrive to make life very pleasant,-— sfc': pitiable, indeed, must be the state of his ▼ digbstive organs. But you might see by this gentleman's countenance that if there were many like him, it would be a worse world for the doctors. His cheek, though not highly coloured, was yet ruddy and clear; his hazel eyes were lively and keen; his hair, which escaped in loose clusters from a jean shooting-cap set jauntily on a well-shaped head, was ot that d&ep sunny auburn rarely seen but in persons of,, vigorous "and hardy temperament. He was good-looking on the whole; and would have deserved the more flattering epithet; of handsome, but for his nose, which was what the French call <a iioseW the air'—not a nose supercilious, not a nose provocative, as such noses mostly are, but: a nose decidedly m earnest t(> makeT the best of itself and of things in general—a nose that would push its • way up in life, but so pleasantly that the most irritable fingers would never itch to lay hold of it. With such a nose a man Mi?ht play the yiolmcello, marry .for love, oreveh: write poetry, and yet not go to the doo-s. i vNever would he stick in the ■mud sa long as he followed that nose m theairl ' :■ • -By the h'efp of that nose this gentleman worA blacf velveteen jacket of foreign ciit; imw^^ache and imperial (then mucH rarer in.England than- they have been since the siegei ..of ..Sebastopol!) and ye^ left you perfectly convinced that he was an honest Englishman, who had »°t °nly no designs on your pocket, hut would not be easily duped by any designs upon Ins own.

The. companion of the. personage thus sketched .might be somewhere about seventeen j but his gait, his air, his lithe vigorous frame, showed, a manliness at

variance with the boyish bloom of his face. He struck the,eye much more than his elder ; ,comrade. Not that he was regularly handsome—far from it; yet it is no paradox to,say that he was beautiful—at least, -few indeed. were the women who

would not have called him so. His hair, long- like his friend's, was of.a dark ches-: ■nut,.' With gold gleamingthrough it where the sun fell, inclining- to curl, and singularly soft and silken in its texture. His large, clear, dark-blue, happy eyes were fringed with' long ebon lashes^ and set under brows which already wore the expression of intellectual power, and, better still, of frank courage and open loyalty. His complexion was fair and somewliat pale,; and his lips in laughing showed teeth exquisitely white and even. But, though his profile was clearly cut, it was far from the Greek ideal, and he wanted the height of stature which is usually considered essential to the personal pretensions of the male sex. Without being positively short he was still under middle height, and from the.compact development of his proportions, seemed to have attained his full growth. His dress, though not foreign, like his comrade's, was peculiar ;—a broadbrimmed straw hat, with a wide blue ribbon ; shirt collar turned down, leaving the throat bare; a dark green jacket, of thinner material than cloth; white trowsers . and waistcoat completed his costume. He looked like a mother's darling—-perhaps he was one.

Scratch across his back went one of those,: ingenious mechanical contrivances familiarly in vogue at fairs, which are designed to impress upon the victim to whom they are applied the pleasing conviction that his garment is rent in twain. : The -boy turned round so quickly that he caught the arm of- the offender—a pretty village girl, a year or two j'punger than him-elf: 'Found in the act, sentenced,

punished,' cried he, snatching a kiss, and receiving a gentle slap. 'And now,) good for evil, here's a ribbon for you-r-choose.'

The girl slunk back shyly, but her companions pushed her forward, and she ended by selecting a cherry-coloured ribbon, for which the boy paid carelessly, while his elder and wiser friend looked at him with grave, compassionate rebuke, and grumbled ■ out; —' Dr. Franklin tells us fthat once in his life he paid too dear for a whistle; but then he- was only seven years old) and a whistle has its uses. But to pay siici a price for a scratchback! — '■ Prodigal! Come along.' As the friends strolled on, naturally enough, all the young girls who 'wished for ribbons and were possessed of scratchbacks, followed in their wake. Scratch went the instruments, but in vain. 'Lasses,' said the elder, turning sharply upon them, his nose in the air, 'ribbons are plentiful —shillings are scarce; and kisses, though pleasant in private, are insipid in public. What, still! Beware ! know that, innocent as we seem, we are woman-eaters; and if you follow us farther, you are devoured !' So saying, he expanded his jaws to a width so preternaturally large, and exhibited a row of grinders so formidable, that the girls fell back in consternation. The. friends turned down a narrow alley between the booths, and though still pursued by some adventurous and mercenary spirits, were compa- j ratively undisturbed as they threaded their way along the back of the booths, and arrived at last on the village green, and in front of the Great Stage. ■"■■?' Oh 6, Lionel !' quoth the elder friend; 'Thespian and classical—worth seeing, no doubt.' Then turning to a grave cobbler, in a leathern apron, who was regarding the dramatis personae rangedin front of the curtain with saturnine interest, he said, ' You seem attracted, sir; you have, probably already witnessed:the.performance.' 'Yes,' returned the cobbler; "' this is the third day, and tormorrow's the hst. ; I "arrTfc missed once yet, and I shan't miss; but it arn't what it was awhile back.' ; ' That is sad;, But then the same thing is said <of .every thing by everybody who has reached your respectable age, friend. Summers and" suns, stupid old wateringplaces, .and pretty young women, 'arnt what they were awhile back. If men and things go on degenerating in this way, our grandchildren will have a dull time ot It!' The Cobbler eyed the young man and nodded approvingly. He had senseenough to comprehend the ironical philosophy of the reply-and our Cobbler loved talk

out of the common way. ' You speaks truly and. cleverly, sir. But if old folks do always say that things are worse than they are bent there always summat in what is always said? I'm for the old

times 5 my neighbour, Joe Spruce, is for the new, and says we are all a progressing. But he's a pink—l'm a blue.' ' You are a blue!' said the boy Lionel— ' I don't understand.'

' Young 'un, a Tory—that's blue, and Spruce is a Rad—that's pink! And, what is more to the purpose, he is a tailor, and I'm a cobbler.'

''AhaF said the elder, with much interest ;'' more to the purpose, is it ? How so?'

The Cobbler put the forefinger of the right hand on the forefinger of the left; it is the gesture of a man about to ratiocinate or demonstrate, as Quintilian, in his remarks on the oratory of fingers, probably observes; or if .he has failed to do so ; it is a blot on his essay. ■

' You see, su-/ quoth the Cobbler, 'that a man's business lias a deal to do with his manner of thinking. Every trade, I take it, lias ; ideas as belong to it. Butchers don't see life as, bakers do; and and if you talk to a dozen tallow.-chandlers, then to a dozen blacksmiths, you will see tallowchandlers are peculiar and blacksmiths too.'

'You are a keen observer/ said he of the jean cap, admiringly ; ' your remark is new to me: I dare say it is true.' Course it is; and the stars have summat to do with it, for if they order a man's calling, it stands to reason that they order a man's mind to fit. Now, a tailor sits on his board with others, and is always a talking with 'em, and a reading the news; therefore he thinks, as his fellows do, smart and sharp, bang up to the day, but, nothing, 'riginal and all his own like. 'But a cobbler/continued the man of leather, with a majestic air, 'sits by hisself, and talks with hisself; and what he thinks gets into his head! without being put there by another man's tongue.', , 'You enlighten me more and more/ said our friend with the cap, bowing respectfully—:' a tailor is gregarious, a cobbler solitary. The gregarious go with the future, the solitary stick by the past. I understand why you are a Tory, and perhaps a poet.';; \ '.'■'" .

' Well, a bit of one,' said the Gobbler, with an iron smile. ' And many's the cobbler who is a poet—oi\discovers marbellous. things in a crystal—whereas a tailor, sir' (spoken .with great contempt) 'only sees tlie upper-leather of the world's sole.in a. newspaper.' , Here the conversation was interrupted by a sudden pressure of the crowd towards the theatre;" the two young friends looked up; the new object of attraction was a little, girl, who seemed scarcely ten years old, though, in truth, she was about two years older. She had just emerged from behind the curtain, made her obeisance to the crowd, and was now walking in front of the stage with the prettiest possible air of infantine solemnity. 'Poor little thing!' said Lionel. .' Poor "little thing!'. said the Cobbler. And had you been there, my reader, ten to one you would have said the same. And yet she was attired in white satin, with spangled flounce and tinsel jacket, and she wore a wreath of .-flowers (to be sure, the flowers were not real) on her long fair- curls, with gaudy bracelets (to be sure, the stones were mock) on her slender arms. Still. there was something in her that all this finery could not vulgarise ; and since it could not vulgarise, you pitied her for it: She had one of those charming faces that look straight into the hearts of us all, voting and old. Although she seemed quite self-possessed, there was no effrontery in her air, but the ease of a little lady with the simple unconsciousness of a child that there was anything in her situation to induce you to sigh, 'Poor thing.' ■ ' 'You should see her act, young gents, said the Cobbler—' she plays uncommon. But if you had seen him as taught her— seen him a year ago.', ; 'Who's.that?' ,«■•,. :".■ '- ' . i 'WaiiK sir ;imayhap you/have heard speak of Waife ?' V .„■,..'.--> ; - 'I blush to say no.'. V • > ! < Why, he might have made his fortune at Common Garden; but that's a longstory. Poor fellow!, he's broke down now anyhow. But she takes care of him, little darling—God : bless thee!'. and the Cobbler here exchanged a smile and nod with the little girl, whose face brightened when she saw him amidst the crowd. s «By the brush and pallet of Raffaelle,' cried the elder of the young men, < before

I am many hours older I must have that child's head!'

'Her head,- man!' cried the Cobbler aghast.

''In my sketch-book. You are a poet —I a painter. You know the little girl V 'Don't I! She and her grandfather lodge with me —her grandfather—that's Waite—marbellous man! But . they illuses him; and if it wasn't for her, he'd starve. He fed them all once; he can feed them no longer—he'd starve ! That's the world; they use up a genus, and when it falls on the road, push on; that's what Joe Spruce calls a-progressing. But there's the drum! they're a-going to act; won't you look in, gents V 'Of course,' cried Lionel—of course. And hark ye, Vance, we'll toss up which shall be the first to take that little .Bill's head.'

' Murderer in either sense of the word!' said Vance, with a smile that would have become Correggio if a tyro had offered to toss up whifth should be the first to paint a cherub. J- CHAPTER 11. The Historian takes a view of the British Stage as represented by the Irregular Drama, the Regular having (ere the date of the events to which this narrative i 3 restricted) disappeared from the Vestiges of Creation. They entered the little theatre, and the Cobbler with them; but the last retired modestly to the threepenny row. The young gentlemen were favoured with reserved seats, price one shilling. ' Very dear/ murmured Vance, as he carefully buttoned the pocket to which he restored a purse woven from links of steel, after the fashion of'chain mail. Ah, ' JVlesssieurs' and ' Confreres' the dramatic authors, do not flatter yourselves that we are about to give you a complacent triumph over the Grand Melodrame of ' The Remorseless Baron and the Bandit's Child.' We grant it was horrible rubbish, regarded in an aesthetic point of view, but it was mightily effective in the theatrical. Nobody yawned; you did not even hear a cough, n r the cry of that omnipresent baby, who is always sure to set up a ' Vag'tu; ingens,' or unappeasable wail, in the midmost interest of a classical five-act piece, represented for the first time on the metropolitan boards. Here the story rushed on ' per fas antnefas/ and the audiance went with it. Certes, some man who understood the stage must have puf the incidents together, and then left it to each illiterate histrio to find the words—Avprds, my dear ' confreres/ signify so little in an acting play. The movement is the thing1. Grand secret! Analyse, practise, it, aid restore to grateful stars that lost Pleiad, the British Acting Drama. Of' course, the Bandit was an ill-used and most estimable man. He had some mysterious rights to the Estate and Castle of the Remorseless B.u-on. The titled

usurper, therefore, did all in his power to hunt the Bandit out in his fastnesses, and bring him to a bloody end. Here the interest centred itself in the Bandit's child,

who, we need not say, was the little girl in the wreath and spangles, styled in the playbill 'Miss. Juliet Araminta Waife,' and the incidents consisted in her various devices to foil the pursuit of the Baron and save her father. Some of these incidents- were indebted to the Comic Muse, and kept the audience in a broad laugh. Her arch playfulness here was exquisite. With what vivacity she duped the High Sheriff, who had the commands of' his king to take the Bandit alive or dead, into the Pbelief that the very lawyer employed by the Baron was the very criminal in disguise, and what pearly teeth she showed when the lawyer was seized and gagged; how dexterously she ascertained the weak point in the character of the ' King's Lieutenant' (Seiine premier,') who was deputed by his royal master to aid tha Remorseless Baron 'in trouncing the Bandit ; how cunningly she learned that lie was in love with the Baron's ward Qfeune amoreuse,') whom that unworthy noble intended to force into a marriage with himself on account of her fortune; how prettily she passed notes to and fro, the Lieutenant never suspecting that she was'the Bandit's child, and at last got the king's soldier on her side as the event, proved. And oh! how gaily, and with what mimic .heart she stoic into the Baron's castle, disguised herself as a witch, startled his conscience with ■revelations and predictions, frightened all the vassals with blue lights and chemical illusions, and venturing even into the usurper's own private chamber while that tyrant, was tossing restless on the icouejv, over which hung: nis terrible sword, ab-' stracted from bis eager the deeds that

proved the better rights of the persecuted ii andit. Then, when he awoke before she could escape with her treasure, and pursued her with his sword, with what g-lee she apparently set herself on fire, and skipped out of the casement in an explosion of crackers. And when the drama approached its denouement, when the Baron's men, and the royal officers qf justice, had, despite all her arts, tracked the Bandit to the cave in which, after various retreats, he lay hidden, wounded by shots, and bruised by a fall from a precipice,—with what admirable byplay she hovered around the spot, with what pathos she sought to decoy away the pursuers —■ it was the skylark playing* round the nest. And when ail was vain—when, no longer to be deceived, the enemies tried to seize her, how mockingly she eluded them, bounded tip the rock, and shook her slight iinger at them in scorn. Surely she will save that inestimable Bandit still! Now, hitherto, though the Bandit was the nominal hero of the piece, .though you were always hearing of him—his wrongs, virtues, hair-breadth escapes, he had never been seen. IS Tot Mrs. Harris, in the immortal narrative, was more quoted and more mythical. But in the last scene there was the Bandit, there in his cavern,

Lelpless with bruises and wounds, Wing* on a rock. In rushed the enemies, Baron, High Sheriff, and all, to seize him. Not a word spoke the Bandit, but his attitude was sublime—even Vance cried * bravo ;' and just as he is seized, halter round his neck, and about to be hanged, down from the chasm above leaps his child, holding1 the title-deeds, filched from the Baron, and by her side the King's Lieutenant, who proclaims the Bandit's pardon, with due restoration to his honours and estates, and consigns, to the astounded Sheriff, the august person of the Remorseless Baron. Then the affecting- scene, father and child in each other's arms; and then an exclamation, which had been long hovering about the lips of many of the audience, broke out "Waife, Waife!" Yes, the Bandit, who appeared but in the last scene, and even then uttered not a word, was the once great actor on that itinerant Thespian stage, known through many a fair for his exuberant humour, his impromptu jokes, his arch' eye, his redundant life of drollery, and the strange pathos or dignity with which he could suddenly exalt a jester's part, and call forth tears jn the startled hush of laughter; he who, the Cobbler had rightly said, 'might have made a fortune at Covenfc Garden.' There was the remnant of the old popular mime ! ■—all'his-attributes of eloquence reduced to dumb show ! Masterly touch of nature and of art in this representation of him— touch which all, who had ever in former rears seen and heard him on that stage, felt simultaneously. He came in for his personal portion of dramatic tears. " Waife, Waife?" cried many a village voice, as the little girl led him to the front of the stage. He hobbled; there was a bandage round his eyes. The plot, in describing the accident that had befallen the Bandit, idealised the g-enuine infirmities that had befallen him since last seen in that village He was blind with one eye; he had become crippled; some malady of the trachea or larynx had seemingly broken up the once joyous key of the old pleasant voice. He did not trust himself to speak, even on that stage, but silently bsnt his head to the rustic audience; and Vance, who was an habitual playgoer, saw in that simple salutation that "the man was an artistic actor. All was over, the audience streamed out, affected, and talking one to the other. It had not been at ail like the ordinary stage exhibitions at a village fair. Vance and Lionel stared at each other in surprise, and then, by a common impulse, moved towards the" stage, pushed aside the curtain, which had fallen, and were in that strange world which has so many reduplications, fragments of one broken mirror, whether in the proudest theatre, or the lowliest barn, nay, whether in the palace of kings, the cabinet of statesmen, the home of domestic life—the world we call ' Behind the Scenes.' [to be continued.]