eneral credit of which, I
should add, was highly re-established for us by the consummately quiet
and natural art, as we expertly pronounced it, of Alfred Wigan's John
Mildmay and the breadth and sincerity of the representative of the rash
mother-in-law whom he so imperturbably puts in her place. This was an
exhibition supposed in its day to leave its spectators little to envy in
the highest finish reached by the French theatre. At a remarkable
height, in a different direction, moved the strange and vivid little
genius of Robson, a master of fantastic intensity, unforgettable for
us, we felt that night, in Planche's extravaganza of The Discreet
Princess, a Christmas production preluding to the immemorial
harlequinade. I still see Robson slide across the stage, in one sidelong
wriggle, as the small black sinister Prince Richcraft of the fairy-tale,
everything he did at once very dreadful and very droll, thoroughly true
and yet none the less _macabre_, the great point of it all its parody of
Charles Kean in The Corsican Brothers; a vision filled out a couple of
years further on by his Daddy Hardacre in a two-acts version of a
Parisian piece thriftily and coarsely extracted from Balzac's Eugenie
Grandet. This occasion must have given the real and the finer measure of
his highly original talent; so present to me, despite the interval, is
the distinctiveness of his little concentrated rustic miser whose
daughter helps herself from his money-box so that her cousin and lover
shall save a desperate father, her paternal uncle, from bankruptcy; and
the prodigious effect of Robson's appalled descent, from an upper floor,
his literal headlong tumble and rattle of dismay down a steep staircase
occupying the centre of the stage, on his discovery of the rifling of
his chest. Long was I to have in my ears the repeated shriek of his
alarm, followed by a panting babble of wonder and rage as his impetus
hurled him, a prostrate scrap of despair (he was a tiny figure, yet "so
held the stage" that in his company you could see nobody else) half way
across the room. I associate a little uncertainly with the same night
the sight of Charles Matthews in Sheridan's Critic and in a comedy
botched from the French, like everything else in those days that was not
either Sheridan or Shakespeare, called Married for Money; an example
above all, this association, of the heaped measure of the old
bills--vast and various enumerations as they were, of the size