going mad about something; and Englishmen and Englishwomen all agreed to go crazy about "Vilikins." "Right tooral lol looral" was on every lip. Robson's portrait as _Jem Baggs_ was in every shop-window. A newspaper began an editorial with the first line in "Vilikins,"-- "It's of a liquor-merchant who in London did dwell." A Judge of Assize absolutely fined the High Sheriff of a county one hundred pounds for the mingled contempt shown in neglecting to provide him with an escort of javelin-men and introducing the irrepressible "Right tooral lol looral" into a speech delivered at the opening of circuit. Nor was the song all that was wonderful in _Jem Baggs_. His "make-up" was superb. The comic genius of Robson asserted itself in an inimitable lagging gait, an unequalled snivel, a coat and pantaloons every patch on and every rent in which were artistic, and a hat inconceivably battered, crunched, and bulged out of normal, and into preternatural shape. New triumphs awaited him. In the burlesque of "The Yellow Dwarf," he showed a mastery of the grotesque which approached the terrible. Years before, in _Macbeth_, he had personated a red-headed, fire-eating, whiskey-drinking Scotchman,--and in _Shylock_, a servile, fawning, obsequious, yet, when emergency arose, a passionate and vindictive Jew. In the _Yellow Dwarf_ he was the jaundiced embodiment of a spirit of Oriental evil: crafty, malevolent, greedy, insatiate,--full of mockery, mimicry, lubricity, and spite,--an Afrit, a Djinn, a Ghoul, a spawn of Sheitan. How that monstrous orange-tawny head grinned and wagged! How those flaps of ears were projected forwards, like unto those of a dog! How balefully those atrabilious eyes glistened! You laughed, and yet you shuddered. He spoke in mere doggerel and slang. He sang trumpery songs to negro melodies. He danced the Lancashire clog-hornpipe; he rattled out puns and conundrums; yet did he contrive to infuse into all this mummery and buffoonery, into this salmagundi of the incongruous and the _outre_, an unmistakably tragic element,--an element of depth and strength and passion, and almost of sublimity. The mountebank became inspired. The Jack Pudding suddenly drew the _cothurnus_ over his clogs. You were awe-stricken by the intensity, the vehemence, he threw into the mean balderdash of the burlesque-monger. These qualities were even more apparent in his subsequent personation of _Medea_, in Robert Brough's parody of the Franco-Italian tragedy. The love, the hate, the scorn, of the abandoned wife of _Jason_, the diabolic loathing in which she holds _Creuesa_, the tigerish affection with which she regards the children whom she is afterwards to slay,--all these were portrayed by Robson, through the medium, be it always remembered, of doggerel and slang, with astonishing force and vigor. The original _Medea_, the great Ristori herself, came to see Robson, and was delighted with and amazed at him.