Page:English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the nineteenth century.djvu/178

 George's share of the work, it seems unjust (to say the least of it) that the credit of the whole performance should be assigned to him alone. Let us be just to Robert, even though his merit as a draughtsman has been lost sight of in the fame which the younger brother achieved by virtue of his greater genius.

The reader need not be told—and we are not going to tell him what he knows already—that the "Life" was dramatized by four writers for different theatrical houses. The most successful version was the one produced at the Adelphi, previously known as the Sans Pareil theatre. The first season of this house, which Messrs Jones and Rodwell had recently purchased for £25,000, was only moderately successful; but the fortune of the second was made by "Tom and Jerry." Night after night immediately after the opening of the doors, the theatre was crowded to the very ceiling; the rush was tremendous. By three o'clock in the afternoon of every day the pavement of the Strand had become impassable, and the dense mass which occupied it had extended by six o'clock far across the roadway. Peers and provincials, dukes and dustmen, all grades and classes of people swelled the tide which night after night rolled its wave up the passage of the Adelphi. It was a compact wedge; on it moved, slowly, laboriously, amid the shouts and shrieks, the justling and jostling of the crowd which composed it, leavened by the intermixture of numbers of the swell mob, who plied their vocation with indefatigable industry and impunity. Nevertheless, the reader will be surprised to learn (and it is probably little known) that in spite of this amazing popularity, the first night of "Tom and Jerry" met with such unexpected opposition that Mr. Rodwell declared it should never be played again. Luckily for himself and his partner he was induced to reconsider this decision. The tide was taken at the flood, and it led—as the poet assures us that it will lead when so taken—to an assured fortune.

One night a stranger entered the private box of the Duke of York at the Adelphi, and seated himself immediately behind his Royal