Clowns -- Great Britain -- Biography; Grimaldi, Joseph, 1779-1837
_A startling effect._]
FOOTNOTES:
[33] Sadler's Wells opened on Easter Monday, April 11th, 1803, under
a change of proprietors. Mr. Hughes retained his fourth; Thomas and
Charles Dibdin had purchased Mr. Siddons' fourth for 1400_l._; Barford
and Yarnold had bought the fourth previously held by Mr. Thos. Arnold,
of the First Fruits Office; Mr. Reeve purchased the eighth, hitherto
the property of Mr. Wroughton; and Mr. Andrews the eighth previously
held by Mr. Coates. The season is memorable for the appearance on that
stage of the celebrated traveller, Signor Giambattista Belzoni, as the
Patagonian Samson, in which character he performed prodigious feats
of strength; one of which was to adjust an iron frame to his body,
weighing 127 lbs., on which he carried eleven persons. On his benefit
night he attempted to carry thirteen, but as that number could not hold
on, it was abandoned. His stature, as registered in the books of the
Alien Office, was six feet six inches.
Poor Tom Ellar, in his Manuscripts, notices--"The first time I met
Signor Belzoni, was at the Royalty Theatre, on Easter Monday, 1808, my
first appearance in London; the theatre closed after the fourth week.
In September of the same year, I again met him at Saunders's booth in
Bartholomew Fair, exhibiting as the French Hercules. In 1809, we were
jointly engaged in the production of pantomime, at the Crow Street
Theatre, Dublin; I as Harlequin, and he as an artist to superintend
the last scene, a sort of Hydraulic Temple, which, owing to what is
very frequently the case, the being over-anxious, failed and nearly
inundated the orchestra. Fiddlers generally follow their leader, and
Tom Cooke was then the man; seeing the water, off he bolted, and they
to a man followed him, leaving me, Columbine, and the other characters,
to finish the scene, in the midst of a splendid shower of fire and
water. Signor Belzoni was a man of gentlemanly but very assuming
manners; yet of great mind." Such was Tom Ellar's opinion of that
memorable man, whose celebrity afterwards as a traveller requires no
record in this place.
CHAPTER X.
1803 to 1805.
Bologna and his Family--An Excursion into Kent with that
personage--Mr. Mackintosh, the gentleman of landed property,
and his preserves--A great day's sporting; and a scene at the
Garrick's Head in Bow-street between a Landlord, a Gamekeeper,
Bologna, and Grimaldi.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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