Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, September 18, 1841Various
General
Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, September 18, 1841
Various
English wit and humor -- Periodicals
But the grand performance of the night is the dramatic piece, which is
generally a three-act opera, embracing the whole debility of the company.
There is the villain, who always looks so wretched as to impress on the
mind that, if honesty is not the best policy, rascality is certainly the
worst. Then there is the lover, whose woe-begone countenance and unhappy
gait, render it really surprising that the heroine, in dirty white
sarsnet, should have displayed so much constancy. The low comedy is
generally done by a gentleman who, while fully impressed with the
importance of the "low," seems wholly to overlook the "comedy;" and there
is now and then a banished nobleman, who appears to have entirely
forgotten everything in the shape of nobility during his banishment. There
is not unfrequently a display of one of the proprietor's children in a
part requiring "infant innocence;" and as our ideas of that angelic state
are associated principally with pudding heads and dirty faces, the
performance is generally got through with a nastiness approaching to
nicety. But it is time to make our escape from the _Bower_, and we
therefore leave them to get through the "Chough and Crow"--which is often
the wind-up, because it admits of a good deal of growling--in our
absence. We cannot be tempted to remain even to witness the pleasing
performances of the "Sons of Syria," nor the "Aunts of Abyssinia." We will
not wait to see Mr. Macdonald sing "Hot codlings" on his head, though the
bills inform us he has been honoured by a command to go through that
interesting process from "_nearly all the crowned heads in Europe_."
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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