We will now bring him over the seas again, and suppose him in the counting-house in Birchin Lane, his factorage satisfactory, and all going on so smoothly that we may expect to find Mr. Liston at last an opulent merchant upon 'Change. But see the turns of destiny. Upon a summer's excursion into Norfolk, in the year 1801, the accidental sight of pretty Sally Parker, as she was then called (then in the Norwich company), diverted his inclinations at once from commerce, and he became stage-struck. Happily for the lovers of mirth was it that he took this turn. Shortly after, he made his _début_ on the Norwich boards, in his twenty-second year. Having a natural bent to tragedy, he chose the part of Pyrrhus in the _Distressed Mother_, to Sally Parker's Hermione. We find him afterwards as George Barnwell, Altamont, Chamont, &c.; but, as if nature had destined him to the sock, an unavoidable infirmity absolutely incapacitated him for tragedy. His person at this latter period was graceful and even commanding, his countenance set to gravity; he had the power of arresting the attention of an audience at first sight almost beyond any other tragic actor. But he could not hold it. To understand this obstacle, we must go back a few years to those appalling reveries at Charnwood. Those illusions, which had vanished before the dissipation of a less recluse life and more free society, now in his solitary tragic studies, and amid the intense call upon feeling incident to tragic acting, came back upon him with tenfold vividness. In the midst of some most pathetic passages--the parting of Jaffier with his dying friend, for instance--he would suddenly be surprised with a fit of violent horse-laughter. While the spectators were all sobbing before him with emotion, suddenly one of those grotesque faces would peep out upon him, and he could not resist the impulse. A timely excuse once or twice served his purpose, but no audience could be expected to bear repeatedly this violation of the continuity of feeling. He describes them (the illusions) as so many demons haunting him, and paralyzing every effort: it is said that he could not recite the famous soliloquy in _Hamlet_, even in private, without immoderate fits of laughter. However, what he had not force of reason sufficient to overcome, he had good sense enough to turn into emolument, and determined to make a commodity of his distemper. He prudently exchanged the buskin for the sock, and the illusions instantly ceased, or, if they occurred for a short season, by this very co-operation added a zest to his comic vein; some of his most catching faces being (as he expressed it), little more than transcripts and copies of those extraordinary phantasmata.