The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 1: Miscellaneous ProseLamb, Charles
General
The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 1: Miscellaneous Prose
Lamb, Charles
English literature
The _Jovial Crew_ or the _Merry Beggars_ has been revived here [the
English Opera] after an interval, as the bills tell us, of seven years.
Can it be so long (it seems but yesterday) since we saw poor LOVEGROVE
in _Justice Clack_? his childish treble still pipes in our ears: "Whip
'em, whip 'em, whip 'em." DOWTON was the representative of the Justice
the other night, and shook our ribs most incontinently. He was in
"excellent foolery," and our lungs crowed chanticleer. Yet it appears to
us, that there was a still higher strain of fatuity in his
predecessor--that his eyes distilled a richer dotage. Perhaps after all
it was an error of the memory. Defunct merit comes out upon us
strangely.
Easy natural WRENCH was the _Springlove_; too comfortable a personage
perhaps to personify _Springlove_, in whom the voice of the bird awakens
a restless instinct of roaming that had slept during the winter. Miss
STEVENSON certainly leaves us nothing to regret for the absence of the
Lady, however agreeable, who formerly performed the part of _Meriel_.
Miss STEVENSON is a fine open-countenanced lass, with glorious girlish
manners. But the _Princess of Mumpers_, and _Lady Paramount_, of
beggarly counterfeit accents, was _she_ that played _Rachel_. Her
gabbling lachrymose petitions; her tones, such as we have heard by the
side of old woods, when an irresistible face has come peeping on one on
a sudden; with her full black locks, and a _voice_--how shall we
describe it?--a voice that was by nature meant to convey nothing but
truth and goodness, but warped by circumstance into an assurance that
she is telling us a lie--that catching twitch of the thievish
irreproveable finger--those ballad-singers' notes, so vulgar, yet so
unvulgar--that assurance, so like impudence, and yet so many countless
leagues removed from it--her jeers, which we had rather stand, than be
caressed with other ladies' compliments, a summer's day long--her face,
with a wild out-of-door's grace upon it--
Altogether, a brace of more romantic she-beggars it was never our
fortune to meet in this supplicatory world. The youngest might have sate
for "pretty Bessy," whose father was an Earl, and whose legend still
adorns the front of mine Hostess's doors at Bethnal-Green; and the other
could be no less than the "Beggar Maid" whom "King Cophetua wooed."
"What a lass that were," said a stranger who sate beside us, speaking of
Miss KELLY in _Rachel_, "to go a gipseying through the world with." We
confess we longed to drop a tester in her lap, she begged so masterly.
By the way, this is the true _Beggar's Opera_. The other should have
been called the _Mirror for Highwaymen_. We wonder the Societies for the
Suppression of Mendicity (and other good things) do not club for the
putting down of this infamous protest in favour of air, and clear
liberty, and honest license, and blameless assertion of man's original
blest charter of blue skies, and vagrancy, and nothing-to-do.
* * * *.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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