and Grimaldi's early decrepitude was no doubt induced by too great muscular exertion, and by colds caught night after night, whilst in transitu from one playhouse to the other.

It never appears to enter into the calculations of the multitude that performers are mere men and women; and the most stupendous efforts, made nightly, remain quite unappreciated by the public. Those who have seen Kean supported at the wing through a long part, and at the close of it wrapped up in a fur cloak, and put to bed;-those who remember Munden acting, when, from gout, he could not walk when off the stage, though, from some mysterious principle of dramatic excitement, he managed to do so on it;--those who have seen Grimaldi rubbed down after coming off from each scene," to get the knots out of his legs," or Gouffé, Mazurier, Parsloe, &c., lying panting on their faces, between each effort, whilst barley water was poured down their throats; those persons will well know that the sicknesses from which actors too often suffer are caused, not by indiscretions, but by their duties calling for more exertions than their frames can bear*.

An attempt to describe Mr. Grimaldi's Clown has always proved a failure his humour could not be tied down to pen, ink, and paper; it was an essence too subtle to yield to mere phraseology. His eyes, large, globular, and sparkling, rolled in a riot of joy; his mouth, capacious, yet with a never-ending power of extension, could convey all sorts of physical enjoyment and distaste; his nose was not the mere bowsprit appendage we find that respectable feature to be in general: it was a vivacious excrescence capable of exhibiting disdain, fear, anger, even joy. We think we see him now screwing it on one side; his eyes, nearly closed, but twinkling forth his rapture; and his tongue a little extended in the fulness of his enjoyment; his chin he had a power of lowering, we will not say to what button of his waistcoat, but certainly the drop was an alarming one.

It always appeared to us that Grimaldi moved his ears; and this, anatomically speaking, is not an impossibility. Be it as it may, the way in which he drew down his lower jaw on any sudden surprise gave this effect to the auricular organs. Speech would have been thrown away in his performance of Clown; every limb of him had a language. What eloquent legs were his! Look at him approaching that cottage of gentility; THE man is changed: see how he stands looking at the window, at which hangs a bonnet: his back is toward you; but it tells the tale, the lady within is to be won. Look how he bends towards the balcony-Romeo in red and white: see how mincingly he puts forth his foot, and passes his hand over his garments; he must woo in another shape; he turns round in utter bewilderment; anon a boy passes he plays at marbles with him, first for money, then for his jacket; he wins it: a dandy passes-he abstracts his coat tails: a miller-he steals a sack: he has stolen yonder chimney-pot, and made a hat; taken that dandizette's shawl, and converted it into a waistcoat: the sack becomes white ducks; the tails render the jacket a coat; a cellar-door iron ring forms an eye-glass; and he moves, an admirable caricature of the prevailing fashion of the day.

Poor Parsons gasped through all his characters. For years he was slowly dying of asthma. Kemble suffered intensely from the same cause; yet I have heard the one called a drunkard, and George Colman vilified the other for eating opium, which he did, to allay a while the agony under which he suffered.

Then, was there ever such a coach-builder? Go to school, Mr. Houlditch; for, with a coal-scuttle and a few cheeses, Grimaldi would construct you a vehicle at a moment's notice. Is his vegetable man unforgotten? He was no paltry humorist who conceived the notion of making a melon into a head, and turnips and radishes do the duty of hands and fingers. His love-making-what infinite variety in his approaches! His boisterous freedom with the London fish-dealer; his sailor-like jollity at Portsmouth; his exquisite nonchalant air when attired as a dandy; and his undeniable all-overishness when, as Clown, he meant to impress, being suddenly smitten by the beauty of his fair enslaver. It was all what we had an hundred times seen, without the innate ridiculousness of the things being made apparent to us. Grimaldi had looked on the follies of humanity, and fairly turned the seamy side without. Then his treatment of that old man villainous, "yclept Pantaloon," whom, old and infirm as he is, no one pities at all, though he is treated by all the persons of the medley drama in a way that no elderly gentleman should be expected to endure. We applauded and rejoiced in those vices in Grimaldi that we hated in the Pantaloon; here is a bone for your metaphysicians to pick: we were quite blind to the moral delinquency of Mons. Clown's habits; he was a thief—we loved him, nevertheless; a coward, a most detestable coward-still we loved him he was cruel, treacherous, unmanly, ungenerous, greedy, and the truth was not in him-yet, for all this, multiplied up to murder, if you would, we loved him, and rejoiced in his successes. Clown, (Grimaldi's Clown we mean,) Punch, and Falstaff (Shakspeare can afford to be put in any company), are all darlings of our souls, though, if we reason about the matter, we find them to be all most incomprehensible vagabonds. Grimaldi had certainly studied the gamut of merriment, and knew every note of its compass, and could discourse most excellent music. He was the finest practical satirist we ever had, Hogarth in action*; during his day there were an hundred clever men, but no single Clown. Follett was a jumper only; Laurent was ingenious, not humorous; Bradbury was a man of great strength, but his was very dreary merriment; Kirby was too confined; Bristow, Hartland, and that school, were mere imitators of the great original; Paulo and Southby, both clever, never stood the slightest chance in competition with him; and young Joe was only the shadow of the shade of that Grimaldi that our boyhood recalls; he only approached to an imitation of the style of his father in his latter and weaker day.

Pantomimes are now virtually extinct; Stanfield and Roberts have made picture galleries of them. Be it so. Grimaldi will in a few years be but a name; and our children's children must be content to take the tale of his merits on the credit of their ancestors. We believe in Garrick, whom we never saw, and those to come may believe in Grimaldi; for, though in a low department of art, he was the most wonderful creature of his day, and far more unapproachable in his excellence than Kean or Kemble in theirs. He sleeps well, and had happily quitted the stage ere pantomimes had been driven from it: he was a harmless, and a kind man, had many friends, and few enemies.—Sit tibi terra levis !

Remember his scene when he opens three oysters, and finds an apt excuse for eating them all; his dagger scene; his duel; his skeleton scene, cum mu'tis aliis.

"I beg your pardon, Madam; but you are a little too fast."

I think, Sir, you are a little too slow."

"No, Madam-no, indeed."

"Are you sure you are right, Sir ?"

"As the sun, Madam-as the sun.

"Well, I confess it-I am one of the giddiest things at a watch!" "Will you, Madam, permit me to regulate your chronometer by mine?"

"Oh, Sir, with pleasure-with many thanks."

"Diamonds, doubtless ?"

"They ought to be."

There appears but little in the above courteous interchange of words; and yet, as we hope to make the reader confess, they were the prologue to a most important drama. "Will you, Madam, permit me to regulate your chronometer by mine?" That so polite, so urbane an offer should ever meet with an ill reward!

Henry Snow was a placid bachelor of two-and-forty. The whole world was to him one green spot, in which comforts grew as thick as daisies. Cupid had very often aimed at him, but never shot. "I hate that Mr. Snow-he's so polite!" was the hasty expression of a young lady in the five-and-twentieth year of Mr. Snow's age-Henry at the time having affability for a bevy of thirty women; and, a justice that is sometimes very annoying, scrupulously sharing his politeness among all. Not one young lady gained half a look, an approach to a smile, more than another. Now, there is an implied invulnerability in such conduct very galling to the enemy. But so it was with Henry Snow; he would hand his heart, so to speak, in slices to a large circle, and with the same agreeable equanimity that an undertaker walks round with funeral cake. However, Achilles had his heel-and Henry Snow met Patty Larkspur.

To a contemplative mind, autumn brings a sweet and bitter melancholy. The leaves, "thin dancers upon air," do not take our thoughts to Taglioni; and the wind, moaning, sobbing through the branches, does not always carry us to the last new opera. It is highly necessary that the reader should pay due attention to this, our profound reflection, inasmuch as he will then the more deeply sympathize with our hero, believing the very season to have taken part with Patty Larkspur against him. Not that we are disposed to undervalue the single power of the lady; we think it more than probable, from the knowledge of her great spirit of enterprise, that, at any quarter of the year, Henry Snow must have fallen; still, had it been spring instead of autumn, we are inclined to think he would have made a longer fight of it. We have said that, to all men of any degree of sensibility, autumn brings its gentle sadness; but in a bachelor of two-and-forty there arises a peculiar train of reflection he begins to doubt the efficacy of a warming-pan contrasted with other means of effecting the same result; his housekeeper begins to merge her deference to the master in friendship to the man; there are twenty delicate household appeals, too delicate to be shaped into language. In a word, it was the beginning of autumn when Henry

Snow, bachelor, sat, in the Hastings coach, opposite to Patty Larkspur, spinster. That the ruin of the man should be complete, there was no other passenger, save a large brown pointer, the favoured property of the lady. Poor Henry Snow!

The reader has, doubtless, pondered on the heroic feats of some happy child of Mars; has seen him-his white plume conspicuous in the mélée-with a hundred Damascus blades playing like sunbeams about his unhurt head; has seen a whole troop discharge their carbines at him, to the waste of powder and shot, the hero still unwounded. Covered with laurels, he returns to his home; he is deemed by all men unconquerable, invulnerable—nothing can withstand him, nothing can hurt him. Alas, for the end! The unscathed victor, with no thought of war and death, in an evil hour carelessly takes an old rusty pistol from the shelf, loaded and overlooked for twenty years. The flint is worn, the trigger stiff, and the powder damp; and yet the conqueror, by an unlucky motion of the finger, fires the pistol, and its contents meet again in his heart. Unfortunate Henry!-we mean, unhappy

conqueror !

We began our mournful narrative with a short dialogue. The coach was running towards Hastings, the horses, like the steeds of Neptune, snuffing the sea, when Patty Larkspur, looking at her watch, pronounced it to be six o'clock.

I beg your pardon, Madam,” said Henry Snow," but you are a little too fast." And then ensued the conversation which we have already faithfully registered; and which, for the sake of middle-aged bachelors -for it is in the middle state of bachelorship that the animal is in the greatest peril from his pursuers-we would we could cut in leaves of brass. We have given the words; but we have yet to describe―if, indeed, we can the action with which Patty Larkspur took the watch from her side, and placed it in the open palm of Henry Snow. And first, a few words on the person of the fair. We can find no other word, and yet we are loth to call any lady plump; it is a word fitter for pullets than for virgins. However, in the poverty of our language-for we care not to be beholden to France for a phrase-we must call Patty Larkspur plump; nay, she was very plump. The truth is-and we have hugged it so close that we have nearly stifled it-the truth is, Patty Larkspur was fat. She had large blue eyes, which, when showing themselves to the best advantage, looked, as one of her lovers once informed her, like violets blown upon! She had a very fresh colour— very fresh; her red morocco prayer-book was not redder. Her hair hung over her forehead and down her cheeks, like twenty corkscrews turned into flax. Her little comfortable nose was of the shape and size of that diminutive specimen of the mushroom which market-women call the button. Such was the face of Patty Larkspur; but it was a face highly varnished up with smiles. Nevertheless, beneath those smiles-difficult as it was for the sagacity of man to go so far-there was a terrible energy in the woman. But smiles, smiles were her weapons; a story of her girlhood cast the shadow of the coming woman. Patty Larkspur and Matilda Larkspur were the daughters of a small grocer at Uxbridge; now, grocers are the especial victims of Beelzebub, known in learned writ as the god of flies. It was the pleasing duty of the two sisters to waylay, knock down, or in any manner destroy the flies lured by the sweets of their paternal home. A trifling reward

repaid the best destroyer. Matilda caught her victims in stale small beer; but Patty always carried off the prize, for she made war with melted sugar. Matilda died an old maid; for she ignorantly thought that the hearts of men were to be cut through, as Hannibal made through the Alps, with vinegar; whilst Patty Larkspur-but let us not anticipate her interesting history.

"Will you, Madam, permit me to regulate your chronometer by mine?" asked Henry Snow, in the fulness of his innocence.

"Oh, Sir, with pleasure-with many thanks," said Patty Larkspur ; and taking her watch from her side, she gave it to Snow, as if she were making a present of that best estate in this world's paradise, the female heart. Could she have truly and absolutely conveyed away that precious immovable, she could not have smiled with deeper meaning. Such was the outward manifestation of Patty Larkspur; but-shall we say it?—as she gave the watch to the mature bachelor-shall we confess, that on the retina of Patty Larkspur's mind was painted, not a spare biped of two-and forty, but that some association of ideas carried her back to the days of her youth-to the home of her father at Uxbridge; and that she saw in Henry Snow-such tricks does errant fancy play the most innocent!-a large blue fly approaching the fatal sugar? As he touched the regulator, she saw him close to the luscious perdition; and when he had performed his task, and looking in her face, held out the watch-the fly had tumbled in and was lost for ever! Again Patty Larkspur smiled, as she saw her victim vainly struggling in an ocean of sweets.

We have no doubt that, on the part of Patty Larkspur, it was love at first sight; an accident that, however finely handled, has never, in our uneducated opinion, been properly described. It is, however, very difficult to note the many freaks committed by people in that most interesting situation. We have read much upon the subject, and are almost convinced, from certain eloquent passages, that love, taken suddenly, operates like laughing gas; making men-according, we presume, to their nervous system-run at whatever may be before them; grin from ear to ear; knock their heads upon the mute earth; receive love's arrow as a juggler swallows a sword, wriggling most affectingly as the weapon enters him; run round and round, like a dog in the laudable pursuit of his own tail; shout, scream, cry "boh!" sneeze, or, indeed, commit any extravagance made pathetic by the occasion. Why is history silent on the interesting topic? When Petrarch first met Laura in the church of Santa Clara at Avignon, on the sixth of April, in the sixth hour of the morning (and yet people preach the benefit of early rising), in the year thirteen hundred and forty-eight-is it not a fact, hitherto most shamefully hushed up, that so much was he removed from the earth by the glorious vision, that he stood upon one leg for three days afterwards? We are proud of a friendship with a traveller who has seen a portrait of the divine sonneteer, taken when undergoing love at first sight. When Henry the Eighth first beheld Anne Bullen, what was his kingly conduct? Historians have deemed the matter of no account; yet did he not, passing over every form of decency, insist on playing at leap-frog with Cardinal Wolsey, the Pope being unfortunately at Rome? There is nothing of this in Hume; but if the speculations of the most approved writers on love at first sight have any truth in nature, sure we are that Henry the Eighth did not marry Anne Bullen