In 1811 there were two persons, amateurs, who mightily affected theatrical company, namely, the Baron Geramb and Romeo Coates. The Baron was principally known for his enormously long whiskers--so feelingly alluded to by the Regent (vol. ii. p. 85), and there is a very good account of him in _The Annual Register_, April 6, 1812:-- "The much talked of Baron Geramb, who has, for a year or two past, made so conspicuous a figure in this metropolis, is, at last, ordered out of the country. This singular person ushered himself into public notice by publishing a most inflated and ridiculous letter, which he dedicated to the Earl of Moira; in which he described himself as a Hungarian baron who had headed a corps of volunteers in the cause of Austria against France, and stated that, after the peace, he went to Spain to give the benefit of his courage and profound military experience to the oppressed patriots of the Peninsula. He accompanied this production with every other mode of obtaining notoriety, such as filling print-shop windows with three or four different engravings of his person, which few fools bought, in various costumes; a star, a death's head and cross-bones, and other terrific emblems, adorned the person of the baron. Nobody has walked the public streets for some time past who does not know this redoubtable nobleman. "Wherever notoriety could be acquired, there was the Baron Geramb. At the funeral of the late Duke of Albuquerque he exhibited himself in all the parade of grief, in a jet black uniform. Where money alone could not gain admittance, the magnificent exterior of this seeming magnate of Hungary was sure of procuring an introduction. At the Opera, at the Theatres, and the Park, his furred mantle and resplendent stars were seldom missed. When that wonderful master of histrionic art, Mr. Coates, played, or rather attempted to play, Lothario, last winter, at the Haymarket, the Hungarian baron sat with indescribable dignity in the stage box, and appeared the patron of the absurdities of the night, consoling the white-plumed Lothario with his nods, and bows, and cheers, for all the coarse and severe, but justly merited, raillery which was unsparingly dealt out to him from the pit and galleries.