“Your tears have passion in them, and a grace,
A genuine freshness which our hearts avow;
Your smiles are winds whose ways we cannot trace,
That vanish and return we know not how.”
Miss Kelly was twice shot at while acting. In both cases the cruel
assailants were rejected admirers.
In 1850 Mrs. Glover took her farewell benefit at Drury Lane; Farren and
Madame Vestris taking parts in the performance--Mrs. Glover playing Mrs.
Malaprop. She was born in 1779, and had made her first appearance as
Elvina in good Hannah More’s dull tragedy, at Covent Garden, in 1797.
Beautiful in youth, Mrs. Glover had gracefully passed from sighing Juliets
and maundering Elvinas into Mrs. Heidelbergs, Mrs. Candours, and the Nurse
in “Romeo and Juliet.”
Robert Keeley, who was brought up a compositor, was born in Grange Court,
Carey Street, in 1794. He acted at Drury Lane as early as 1819, and at the
Adelphi as early as 1826 as Jemmy Green in “Tom and Jerry.” In 1834 we
find the critics ranking him below Liston and Reeve, but he was very
popular in his representations of cowardly fear and stupid chuckling
astonishment. He left the stage for several years before his death. Miss
Helen Faucit, born in 1816, was the original heroine of Sir Bulwer
Lytton’s and Mr. Browning’s plays. Her Beatrice, Imogen, and Rosalind were
admirable, and her Antigone was a great success. She retired from the
stage in 1851, when she married Mr. Theodore Martin, the accomplished
translator of Horace and Catullus, and the joint author with Professor
Aytoun of those admirable burlesque ballads of “Bon Gaultier.”
William Charles Macready, the son of a Dublin upholsterer, appeared in
London first in 1816. Kean approved his Orestes, and he soon advanced to
Rob Roy, Virginius, and Coriolanus. He then removed to Drury Lane, and
distinguished himself as Caius Gracchus and William Tell, in two of Mr.
Sheridan Knowles’s plays. He reappeared at Drury Lane in 1826. The critics
said that he failed in Rolla and Hamlet, but excelled in Rob Roy,
Coriolanus, and Richard. He himself preferred his own Hamlet. They
complained that he had a burr in his enunciation, and a catching of the
breath--that he was too fond of declamation and violent transitions;
others thought him too heavy and colloquial. In 1826 he went to America,
where the fatal riot of Forrest’s partisans occurred, and twenty-two men
were killed. His season closed at Drury Lane in 1843. His benefit took
place in 1851, and he then retired from the stage to live the life of a
quiet, useful country gentleman in the west of England. He died in 1873,
and lies buried at Kensal Green.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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