Mitchell was forced to retire from the mayoralty before the close of his last season at the Olympic, in 1849-50, having been deposed the previous year by William E. Burton at the Chambers Street house. As Lester Wallack said in his _Memories_, Burton did everything that Mitchell did, and did it in a better way, with better players and better plays. His first burlesque was a cruel treatment of the opera of _Lucia_, followed immediately by a heartless travesty of Dibdin's _Valentine and Orson_. These were succeeded by _The Tempest_, in which Mrs. Brougham (Miss Nelson), a lady of enormous physical size, played Ariel. A little while later Mr. Brougham played Macbeth to the Macduff of Thomas B. Johnstone, the Banquo of Oliver B. Raymond, and the Lady Macbeth of Burton himself. Mark Smith made a fascinating Norma, Leffingwell played the Stern Parient in _Villikens and his Dinah_, and Charles Fisher, in white tights, a tunic, gauze wings, and a flowing wig, pirouetted with Mrs. Skerrett in a production called _St. Cupid_, in which Mr. Burton appeared as Queen Bee, a Gypsy Woman. [Illustration: JOHN BROUGHAM AND GEORGINA HODSON IN "POCAHONTAS."] It would be an easy matter to fill many of these pages with stories of the humorous productions and the laughable performances of Burton and Brougham on the Chambers Street boards. The literature of the American theatre overflows with anecdotes of their quarrels and their reconciliations upon the stage, their jokes upon each other, their impromptu wit, their unexpected "gags"--which were always looked for--the liberties they took with their authors, their audiences, and themselves, and, above all, with their incomparable acting in every part, whether it was serious or frivolous. The last, and in many respects the greatest, of the trio of actors, authors, and managers who may be considered the founders of American burlesque, began his brilliant but brief reign at the Lyceum, at Broome Street, late in 1850, about the time of the retirement of Mitchell, and long before his later rival, Burton, was ready to lay down his sceptre. If America has ever had an Aristophanes, John Brougham was his name. His _Pocahontas_ and _Columbus_ are almost classics. They rank among the best, if they are not the very best, burlesques in any living language. Their wit is never coarse, they ridicule nothing which is not a fit subject for ridicule, they outrage no serious sentiment, they hurt no feelings, they offend no portion of the community, they shock no modesty, they never blaspheme; and, as Dr. Benjamin Ellis Martin has happily expressed it, their author was "the first to give to burlesque its crowning comic conceit of utter earnestness, of solemn seriousness."