PLAY-WRIGHTING.

To the Editor.

Sir, The following short matter-of-fact narrative, if inserted in your widely circulated miscellany, may in some degree tend to lessen the number of dramatic aspirants, and afford a little amusement to your readers.

186

I was, at the age of sixteen, apprenticed to a surgeon, and had served but two years of my apprenticeship, when I began to conceive that I had talents for something superior to the profession I had embraced. I imagined that literature was my forte; and accordingly I tried my skill in the composition of a tale, wherein I was so far successful, as to obtain its insertion in a periodical" of the day. This was succeeded by others; some of which were rejected, and some inserted. In a short time, however, I perceived that I had gained but little fame, and certainly no profit. I therefore determined to attempt dramatic writing, by which I imagined that I should acquire both fame and fortune. Accordingly, after much trouble, I concocted a plot, and in three months completed a farce! I submitted it to my friends, all of whom declared it to be 66 an excellent thing;" and that if merit met with its due reward, my piece would certainly be brought out. Flattered and encouraged by their good opinion, I offered it, with confidence of success, to the proprietors of Drury-lane theatre. In the space of a week, however, my piece was returned, with a polite note, informing me, that it was not in any way calculated for representation at that theatre." I concluded that it could not have been read; and having consoled myself with that idea, I transmitted it to the rival theatre. One morning, after the lapse of a few days, my hopes were clouded by a neat parcel, which I found to contain my manuscript, with the same polite but cutting refusal, added to which was an assurance, "that it had been read most attentively." I inwardly execrated the Covent Garden "reader" for a fool, and determined to persevere. At the suggestion of my friends I made numerous alterations, and submitted my farce to the manager of the Haymarket theatre, relying upon his liberality; but, after the usual delay of a week, it was again returned. At the Lyceum it also met with a similar fate. I was much hurt by these rejections, yet determined to persevere. The minor theatres remained for me, and I applied to

66

the manager of one of these establishments, who, in the course of time, assured me, that my piece should certainly be produced. I was delighted at the brilliant prospects which seemed to open to me, and I fancied that I was fast approaching the summit of my ambition. Three tedious months ensued before I was summoned to attend the rehearsal; but I was then much pleased at the pains the actors appeared to have taken in acquiring their parts. The wished-for night arrived. I never dreamed of failure; and I invited a few of my select friends to witness its first representationit was the last: for, notwithstanding the exertions of the performers, and the ap plause of my worthy friends, so unanimous was the hostility of the audience, that my piece was damned !-damned, too, at a minor theatre! I attributed its failure entirely to the depraved taste of the audience. I was disgusted; and resolved, from that time, never more to waste my talents in endeavouring to amuse an unappreciating and ungrateful public. I have been firm to that resolution. I relinquished the making up of plays for the more profitable occupation of making up prescriptions, and am now living in comfort upon the produce of my profession.

EPIGRAM.

AUCTOR.

A few years ago a sign of one of the Durham inns was removed, and sent to Chester-le-Street, by way of a frolic. It was generally supposed that the feat was achieved by some of the legal students then in that city; and a respectable attorney there was so fully persuaded of it, that he immediately began to make inquiries corroborative of his suspicions. The circumstances drew forth the following epigram from our friend T. Q. M., which has never appeared in print.

From one of our inns was a sign taken down,
And sent by some wags to a neighbouring town.
To a limb of the law the freak caus'd much vexation,
And he went through the streets making wild lament
ation;

And breathing revenge on the frolicsome sparks,
Who, he had not a doubt, were the

clerks." *

gentlemen

THE ROMANS.

The whole early part of the Roman history is very problematical. It is hardly possible to suppose the Romans could have made so conspicuous a figure in Italy, and not be noticed by Herodotus, who finished his history in Magna Græcia. Neither is Rome mentioned by Aristotle, though he particularly describes the government of Carthage. Livy, a writer by no means void of national prejudice, expressly says, they had never heard of Alexander; and here we surely may say in the words of the poet,

"Not to know him, argues themselves unknown."

Pliny, it is true, quotes a passage of Theophrastus, to show that a certain Greek writer, named Clitarchus, mentions an embassy from the Romans to Alexander; but this can never be set against the authority of Livy, especially as Quintilian gives no very favourable opinion of the veracity of the Greek historian in these words,Clitarchi, probatur ingenium, fides infamatur."*

66

A LITERARY BLUNDER.

When the Utopia of sir Thomas More was first published, it occasioned a pleasant mistake. This political romance represents a perfect, but visionary republic, in an island supposed to have been newly discovered in America. As this was the age of discovery, (says Granger,) the learned Budæus, and others, took it for a genuine history; and considered it as highly expedient, that missionaries should be sent thither, in order to convert so wise a nation to Christianity.

TREASURE DIGGING.

A patent passed the great seal in the fifteenth year of James I., which is to be found in Rymer, "to allow to Mary Middlemore, one of the maydes of honor to our deerest consort queen Anne, (of Denmark,) and her deputies, power and authority, to enter into the abbies of Saint Albans, Glassenbury, Saint Edmundsbury, and Ramsay, and into all lands, houses, and places, within a mile, belonging to said abbies;" there to dig, and search after treasure, supposed to be hidden in such places.

* H. J. Pye.

PERSONAL CHARMS DISCLAIMED,

BY A LADY.

If any human being was free from personal vanity it must have been the second duchess d'Orleans, Charlotte Elizabeth of Bavaria. In one of her letters, (dated 9th August, 1718,) she says, "I must certainly feature. My eyes are small, my nose short be monstrously ugly. I never had a good and thick, my lips broad and thin. These are not materials to form a beautiful face. Then I have flabby, lank cheeks, and long features, which suit ill with my low stature. My waist and my legs are equally clumsy. Undoubtedly I must appear to be an odious little wretch; and had I not a tolerabyl good character, no creature could enduer I am sure a person must be a conjuror to judge by my eyes that I have a grain of wit."

me.

FORCIBLE ABDUCTION.

The following singular circumstance is related by Dr. Whitaker in his History of Craven :

Gilbert Plumpton, in the 21 of Henry II., committed something like an Irish marriage with the heiress of Richard Warelwas, and thereby incurred the displeasure of Ranulph de Glanville, great justiciary, who meant to have married her to a dependant of his own. Plumpton was in consequence indicted and convicted of a rape at Worcester; but at the very moment when the rope was fixed, and the executioner was drawing the culprit up to the gallows, Baldwin, bishop of Worcester, running to the place, forbade the officer of justice, in the name of the Almighty, to proceed; and thus saved the criminal's life.

POLITENESS.

A polite behaviour can never be long maintained without a real wish to please; and such a wish is a proof of good-nature. No ill-natured man can be long well-bred. No good-natured man, however unpolished in his manners, can ever be essentially illbred. From an absurd prejudice with regard to good-nature, some people affect to substitute good temper for it; but no qualities can be more distinct: many goodtempered people, as well as many fools, are very ill-natured; and many men of first-rate genius-with which perhaps entire good temper is incompatible-are perfectly, good-natured.

INTEGRITY.

The Viscount de Chateaubriand gratefully memorializes his respect for the virtue of a distressed family in London by the following touching narrative prefixed to his Indian tale, entitled "The Natchez :"

When I quitted England in 1800 to return to France, under a fictitious name, I durst not encumber myself with too much baggage. I left, therefore, most of my manuscripts in London. Among these manuscripts was that of The Natchez, no other part of which I brought to Paris but René, Atala, and some passages descriptive

of America.

Fourteen years elapsed before the communication with Great Britain was renewed. At the first moment of the Re storation I scarcely thought of my papers; and if I had, how was I to find them again? They had been left locked up in a trunk with an Englishwoman, in whose house I had lodged in London. I had forgot ten the name of this woman; the name of the street and the number of the house had likewise escaped my memory.

In consequence of some vague and even contradictory information which I transmitted to London, Messrs. de Thuisy took the trouble to make inquiries, which they prosecuted with a zeal and perseverance rarely equalled. With infinite pains they at length discovered the house where I resided at the west end of the town; but my landlady had been dead several years, and no one knew what had become of her children. Pursuing, however, the clue which they had obtained, Messrs. de Thuisy, after many fruitless excursions, at last found out her family in a village several miles from London.

Had they kept all this time the trunk of an emigrant, a trunk full of old papers, which could scarcely be deciphered? Might they not have consigned to the flames such a useless heap of French manuscripts?

On

the other hand, if my name, bursting from its obscurity, had attracted, in the London journals, the notice of the children of my former landlady, might they not have been disposed to make what profit they could of those papers, which would then acquire a certain value?

Nothing of the kind had happened. The manuscripts had been preserved, the trunk had not even been opened. A religious fidelity had been shown by an unfortunate family towards a child of misfortune. I had committed with simplicity the result

honesty of a foreign trustee, and my trea sure was restored to me with the same simplicity. I know not that I ever met with any thing in my life which touched me, more than the honesty and integrity of this poor English family.

DEVONSHIRE WRESTLING.
For the Table Book.

Abraham Cann, the Devonshire champion, and his brother wrestlers of that county, are objected to for their play, with the foot, called "showing a toe" in Devonshire; or, to speak plainly, "kicking." Perhaps neither the objectors, nor Abraham and his fellow-countrymen, are aware, that the Devonshire custom was also the custom of the Greeks, in the same sport, three thousand years ago. The English reader may derive proof of this from Pope's translation of Homer's account of the wrestling match at the funeral of Patroclus, between Ulysses and Ajax, for prizes offered by Achilles :

-

Scarce did the chief the vigorous strife propose,
When tower-like Ajax and Ulysses rose.
Amid the ring each nervous rival stands,
Embracing rigid, with implicit hands:
Close lock'd above, their heads and arms are mixt;

Below, their planted feet, at distance fixt.
Now to the grasp each manly body bends;
The humid sweat from every pore descends;
Their bones resound with blows; sides, shoulders,
thighs

Swell to each gripe, and bloody tumours rise.
Nor could Ulysses, for his art renown'd,
O'erturn the strength of Ajax on the ground;
Nor could the strength of Ajax overthrow

The watchful caution of his artful foe.
While the long strife e'en tir'd the lookers on,
Thus to Ulysses spoke great Telamon:
Or let me lift thee, chief, or lift thou me;
Prove we our force, and Jove the rest decree:

He said, and straining, heav'd him off the ground
With matchless strength; that time Ulysses for ad
The strength t' evade, and, where the nerves combine,
His ancle struck: the giant fell supine;
Ulysses following, on his bosom lies;
Shouts of applause run rattling through the skies.
Ajax to lift, Ulysses next essays;

He barely stirr'd him but he could not raise :
His knee lock'd fast, the foe's attempt deny'd,
And grappling close, they tumble side by side.

Here we find not only "the lock," be that Ulysses, who is described as renowne for his art, attains to the power of throwing his antagonist by the device of Abraha Cann's favourite kick near the ancle.

I. V.

This stanza is in a delightful little volume, ntitled "The Desolation of Eyam; the Emigrant, a tale of the American Woods; nd other poems: By William and Mary owitt, authors of the Forest Minstrel, &c." he feeling and beauty of one of the poems, Penn and the Indians," suggested the resent engraving, after a celebrated print om a picture by the late Benjamin West. he following particulars are chiefly related y Mr. Clarkson, respecting the scene it presents.

King Charles II., in consideration of a nsiderable sum due from the crown for e services of admiral sir William Penn, anted to his son, the ever-memorable

VOL. II.-41.

William Penn, and his heirs, in perpetuity, a great tract of land on the river Delaware, in America; with full power to erect a new colony there, to sell lands, to make laws, to create magistrates, and to pardon crimes. In August, 1682, Penn, after having written to his wife and children a letter eminently remarkable for its simplicity and patriarchal spirit, took an affectionate leave of them; and, accompanied by several friends, embarked at Deal, on board the Welcome, a ship of three hundred tons burthen. The passengers, including himself, were not more than a hundred. They were chiefly quakers, and most of them from Sussex, in which county his house at