five hundred, were dancing before me,
like the faces which, whether you will or no, come when you have been
taking opium--all the strange combinations, which this strangest of
all strange mortals ever shot his proper countenance into, from the
day he came commissioned to dry up the tears of the town for the loss
of the now almost forgotten Edwin. O for the power of the pencil
to have fixed them when I awoke! A season or two since there was
exhibited a Hogarth gallery. I do not see why there should not be a
Munden gallery. In richness and variety the latter would not fall far
short of the former.

There is one face of Farley, one face of Knight, one (but what a one
it is!) of Liston; but Munden has none that you can properly pin down,
and call _his_. When you think he has exhausted his battery of looks,
in unaccountable warfare with your gravity, suddenly he sprouts out an
entirely new set of features, like Hydra. He is not one, but legion.
Not so much a comedian, as a company. If his name could be multiplied
like his countenance, it might fill a play-bill. He, and he alone,
literally _makes faces_: applied to any other person, the phrase is a
mere figure, denoting certain modifications of the human countenance.
Out of some invisible wardrobe he dips for faces, as his friend
Suett used for wigs, and fetches them out as easily. I should not be
surprised to see him some day put out the head of a river horse; or
come forth a pewitt, or lapwing, some feathered metamorphosis.

I have seen this gifted actor, in Sir Christopher Curry--in Old
Dornton--diffuse a glow of sentiment which has made the pulse of a
crowded theatre beat like that of one man; when he has come in aid of
the pulpit, doing good to the moral heart of a people. I have seen
some faint approaches to this sort of excellence in other players.
But in the grand grotesque of farce, Munden stands out as single and
unaccompanied as Hogarth. Hogarth, strange to tell, had no followers.
The school of Munden began, and must end with himself.

Can any man _wonder_, like him? can any man _see ghosts_, like
him? or _fight with his own shadow_--"SESSA"--as he does in that
strangely-neglected thing, the Cobbler of Preston--where his
alternations from the Cobbler to the Magnifico, and from the Magnifico
to the Cobbler, keep the brain of the spectator in as wild a ferment,
as if some Arabian Night were being acted before him. Who like him
can throw, or ever attempted to thro