Mute at the bar, and in the senate loud,
Dull 'mongst the dullest, proudest of the proud ;
A pert, prim, Prater of the northern race,
Guilt in his heart, and famine in his face,

Stood forth and thrice he waved his lily hand-
And thrice he twirl'd his tye—thrice strok'd his band.

But these, masterly as they might be, were only "limbs and flourishes," for of course the substance of the satire was its picture of the Stage. And how finished was the portraiture, how vivid its reflection of the originals, how faithful the mirror it set up, in which the vainest, most sensitive, and most irritable of mankind, might see themselves for nothing better than they were, will appear in even the few incomplete subjects we here borrow from its gallery.

YATES.

In characters of low and vulgar mould,
Where nature's coarsest features we behold,
Where, destitute of ev'ry decent grace,
Unmanner'd jests are blurted in your face,
There Yates with justice strict attention draws,
Acts truly from himself, and gains applause.
But when, to please himself or charm his wife,
He aims at something in politer life,
When, blindly thwarting Nature's stubborn plan,
He treads the stage by way of gentleman,

The Clown, who no one touch of breeding knows,
Looks like Tom Errand dress'd in Clincher's clothes.
Fond of his dress, fond of his person grown,
Laugh'd at by all, and to himself unknown,
From side to side he struts, he smiles, he prates,
And seems to wonder what's become of Yates.

SPARKS, SMITH, AND ROSS.

Sparks at his glass sat comfortably down

To separate frown from smile, and smile from frown;
Smith, the genteel, the airy, and the smart,

Smith was just gone to school to say his part;

Ross (a misfortune which we often meet)

Was fast asleep at dear Statira's feet;

MOSSOP.

Mossop, attach'd to military plan,

Still kept his eye fix'd on his right-hand man.
Whilst the mouth measures words with seeming skill,
The right-hand labours, and the left lies still;

For he resolved on scripture-grounds to go,

What the right doth, the left-hand shall not know. With studied impropriety of speech

He soars beyond the hackney critic's reach;

To epithets allots emphatic state,

Whilst principals, ungrac'd, like lackies, wait ;
In ways first trodden by himself excels,
And stands alone in indeclinables;
Conjunction, preposition, adverb, join

To stamp new vigour on the nervous line;
In monosyllables his thunders roll,

HE, SHE, IT, AND, WE, YE, THEY, fright the soul.

BARRY.

In person taller than the common size,
Behold where Barry draws admiring eyes!
When lab'ring passions, in his bosom pent,
Convulsive rage, and struggling heave for vent,
Spectators, with imagin'd terrors warm,
Anxious expect the bursting of the storm :
But, all unfit in such a pile to dwell,

His voice comes forth, like Echo from her cell;
To swell the tempest needful aid denies,
And all adown the stage in feeble murmurs dies.
What man, like Barry, with such pains, can err
In elocution, action, character?

What man could give, if Barry was not here,
Such well applauded tenderness to Lear?

Who else can speak so very, very fine,
That sense may kindly end with ev'ry line?

Some dozen lines before the ghost is there,

Behold him for the solemn scene prepare.
See how he frames his eyes, poises each limb,
Puts the whole body into proper trim.
From whence we learn, with no great stretch of art,
Five lines hence comes a ghost, and, Ha! a start.
When he appears most perfect, still we find
Something which jars upon, and hurts the mind;

Whatever lights upon a part are thrown
We see too plainly they are not his own.
No flame from Nature ever yet he caught;
Nor knew a feeling which he was not taught ;
He raised his trophies on the base of art,

And conn'd his passions, as he conn'd his part.

QUIN.

His words bore sterling weight; nervous and strong,
In manly tides of sense they roll'd along.
Happy in art, he chiefly had pretence

To keep up numbers, yet not forfeit sense.
No actor ever greater heights could reach
In all the labour'd artifice of speech. . . .
His eyes, in gloomy socket taught to roll,
Proclaim'd the sullen habit of his soul.
Heavy and phlegmatic he trod the stage,
Too proud for tenderness, too dull for rage.
When Hector's lovely widow shines in tears
Or Rowe's gay rake dependent virtue jeers,
With the same cast of features he is seen
To chide the libertine, and court the queen.
From the tame scene, which without passion flows,

With just desert his reputation rose :

Nor less he pleased, when, on some surly plan,
He was, at once, the actor and the man.

HAVARD AND DAVIES.

Here Havard, all serene, in the same strains

Loves, hates, and rages, triumphs, and complains ;
His easy vacant face proclaim'd a heart

Which could not feel emotions, nor impart.

With him came mighty Davies. On my life
That Davies hath a very pretty wife!

Statesman all over !—In plots famous grown !—
He mouths a sentence, as curs mouth a bone.

DAVID GARRICK.

Last Garrick came.—Behind him throng a train

Of snarling critics, ignorant as vain.

One finds out," He's of stature somewhat low,—

Your hero always should be tall you know.

True natural greatness all consists in height."
Produce your voucher, Critic.-"Sergeant Kite."

Another can't forgive the paltry arts,

By which he makes his way to shallow hearts ;
Mere pieces of finesse, traps for applause--
"Avaunt! unnatural Start, affected Pause."

For me, by Nature form'd to judge with phlegm,
I can't acquit by wholesale, nor condemn.
The best things carried to excess are wrong:
The start may be too frequent, pause too long ;
But, only us'd in proper time and place,
Severest judgment must allow them grace.

If bunglers, form'd on Imitation's plan,
Just in the way that monkies mimic man,
Their copied scene with mangled arts disgrace,
And pause and start with the same vacant face,
We join the critic laugh; those tricks we scorn
Which spoil the scenes they mean them to adorn.
But when, from Nature's pure and genuine source,
These strokes of acting flow with generous force,
When in the features all the soul's portray'd,
And passions, such as Garrick's, are display'd,
To me they seem from quickest feelings caught :
Each start is Nature, and each pause is Thought.

With temper heard, with judgment weigh'd each claim
And, in their sentence happily agreed,

In name of both, Great Shakespeare thus decreed.

"If manly sense, if nature link'd with art;

If thorough knowledge of the human heart;

If powers of acting, vast and unconfined;

If fewest faults, with greatest beauties join'd;

If strong expression, and strange powers which lie
Within the magic circle of the eye;

If feelings which few hearts, like his, can know,

And which no face so well as his can show,

Deserve the preference ;-Garrick ! take the chair,
Nor quit it-till thou place an Equal there "

To account for the reception Satire commonly meets with in the world, and for the scant number of those who are offended with it, it has been compared to a sort of glass wherein beholders may discover every body's face but their own. The class whom the Rosciad principally offended, however, could discover nobody's face but their

own.

"I

It was the remark of one of themselves, that they ran about the town like so many stricken deer. They cared little on their own account, they said; but they grieved so very much for their friends. "Why should "this man attack Mr. Havard?" remonstrated one. "am not at all concerned for myself; but what has poor "Billy Havard done, that he must be treated so cruelly?" To which another with less sympathy rejoined: "And pray, what has Mr. Havard done, that he cannot bear "his misfortunes as well as another?" For, indeed, many more than the Billy Havards had their misfortunes to bear. The strong, quite as freely as the weak, were struck at in the Rosciad. The Quin, the Mossop, and the Barry, as we have seen, had as little mercy as the Sparks, the Ross, and the Davies; and even Garrick was too full of terror at the avalanche that had fallen, to rejoice very freely in his own escape. Forsooth, he must assume indifference to the praise, and suggest with off-hand grandeur to one of his retainers, that the writer had treated him civilly no doubt, with a view to the freedom of the theatre. He had the poor excuse for this fribbling folly (which Churchill heard of, and punished), that he did not yet affect even to know the writer; and was himself repeating the question addressed to him on all sides, Who is He?

It was a question which the Critical Reviewers soon took upon themselves to answer. They were great authorities in those days, and had no less a person than Smollett at their head. But here they bungled sadly. The field which the Rosciad had invaded, they seem to have thought their own; and they fell to the work of resentment in the spirit of the tiger commemorated in the Rambler, who roared without reply and ravaged without resistance. If they could have anticipated either the resistance or the reply, they would doubtless have been a little more discreet. No question could exist of the authorship, they said. The thing was clear. Who were they that the poem made heroes of? Messrs. Lloyd and Colman.