Clowns -- Great Britain -- Biography; Grimaldi, Joseph, 1779-1837
On the night of his death,[95] he was carried home in the usual manner,
and cheerfully bidding his companion good night, observed that he
should be ready for him on the morrow at the customary time. He had not
long been in bed, when his housekeeper fancying she heard a noise in
his room, hurried down, but all was quiet: she went in again later in
the night, and found him dead. The body was cold, for he had been dead
some hours.
A coroner's inquest was held on the following day. The testimony of the
medical gentlemen who had been promptly called in, fully established
the fact that his death had arisen from causes purely natural; and the
jury at once returned a verdict that he had died by the visitation of
God.
He was buried on the ensuing Monday, June the 6th, in the
burying-ground of St. James's Chapel, on Pentonville Hill. In the next
grave lie the bones of his friend, Mr. Charles Dibdin,--so frequently
mentioned in these volumes; the author of many of the pieces in which
he shone in his best days, and of many of the songs with which he was
wont to set his audience in a roar.[96]
Any attempted summary of Grimaldi's peculiarities in this place would
be an impertinence. There are many who remember him, and they need not
be told how rich his humour was: to those who do not recollect him in
his great days, it would be impossible to convey any adequate idea of
his extraordinary performances. There are no standards to compare him
with, or models to judge him by; all his excellences were his own,
and there are none resembling them among the pantomime actors of the
present day.
This is not said with any view of depreciating the abilities of the
many clever actors we have in this peculiar department. Among a variety
of others, Smith and Payne of Covent Garden, (not of Lombard-street),
and Wieland, of Drury Lane, may be mentioned as possessing grotesque
humour of no ordinary kind; while for mere feats of tumbling dexterity,
Brown, King, and Gibson of the Adelphi, perhaps stand unrivalled. It is
no disparagement to all or any of these actors of pantomime, to say,
that the genuine droll, the grimacing, filching, irresistible clown
left the stage with Grimaldi, and though often heard of, has never
since been seen.[97]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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