Page:The Galaxy, Volume 6.djvu/463

1868.] that being the value of a crown in English money. The quantity of poetical posthumous thought in any single churchyard is truly surprising, and where it consists of advice conveyed in the first person, betokens a more general taste for verse in people than is usually credited. We sometimes fear, however, from the recurrence of favorite epitaphs (and nearly every of those just quoted is ancient), that too often the sexton or the stone-cutter has carte blanche from the survivors to select and attribute to the deceased such sentiments from the large collection which experience has made familiar to him, as his own professional taste may sanction. And perhaps this theory, also, will account for the wild vagaries of epitaphic orthography.

— of the legitimate drama are now-a-days setting up a great outcry against the popularity of such dramatic entertainments as they do not put under that head. It is not difficult to sympathize with this complaint, which is partly just; but the trouble is not wholly in the viciousness of public taste. Only in rare cases do we get the "legitimate" drama in an enjoyable way. For example, when you have genteel comedy (which, when well done, is generally as good acting as you can get) most of the players are wholly taken up with making a fine personal impression on the audience. Harry Vavasour and Lord Fitz-Clarence Percy, in glistening hats and rouged cheeks, are forever ogling, and wriggling, and ha-ha-ing, and jauntily hitting the dust out of their tight trowser-legs with their canes, while they talk. All the ladies are exclusively devoted to managing their trails, and flirting their fans, and showing their headdresses at new angles, parroting their parts, meanwhile, mechanically, and saying "I am astounded!" precisely as if it were "It's going to rain." Even the old gentlemen rely mainly for effect on taking snuff, which they do in every rôle, with unhealthy frequency, and as soon as possible after entering. What enormous snuffers are those plethoric, trotting, stick-shaking old fathers, who every night cut off young scapegrace with a shilling, and every night relent with a blessing! Tragedy, as usually acted, is infinitely more annoying than comedy, because there is commonly only one "star," or rocket, and all the rest are "sticks." Of these sticks the worst is the leading actor's horrible double—that second-best actor who imitates him, plays Richmond to his Richard, Iago to his Othello, out-Herods him, bellows louder, and strikes more fire in the fencing, that he may share the applause of the groundlings, as he always does. This dreadful fellow is just good enough to be very bad. The others are generally too ridiculous to be troublesome—but he does imitate nature so abominably! In fine, if people throng to farce and pantomime and the "negro business" and the ballet, it is probably because these latter are at least well done—easier to do well, we admit, but for that very reason oftener consummated. That at least is one plausible, and not far-fetched reason, why the pretended altars of Thalia and Melpomene are sometimes deserted for Humpty Dumpty and Barbe Bleue.

— of diseases of classic derivation have long been a source of queer varieties of pronunciation. We knew of a good, honest brother who used to speak of a certain clerical disease wherewith his pastor was afflicted, as "the brown critters"—meaning the bronchitis. We have heard also (but cannot claim to have known her) of an old lady who labored under the delusion that the malady properly called the varioloid was really the "very O lord." A friend, however, rather goes ahead of these mistakes in his story regarding a fat laundress whom he engaged to go into the country to his villa. She did not appear for several days after the time agreed, but when she did, being asked the cause of her tardiness, she replied: "O, ma'am, I 've been very sick with the cholera infantum." She had been sick, but hardly from that disease, judging from her age and avoirdupois.

— of the newspaper critics has some sly fun regarding a late dramatic performance, which embraced four plays and finished up at midnight. We recall a theatrical benefit given to a wounded fireman at the Bowery, fifteen years ago, in which the bill was as follows: "Katherine and Petruchio," "All that Glitters is not Gold,"