Thames watermen, from London Bridge to Chelsea. This gave rise to the following lines, written by a facetious poet some years after the death of the testator :

"Tom Dogget, the geatest sly drole in his parts,

In acting was certain a master of arts.

A monument left-no herald is fuller,

His praise is sung yearly by many a sculler.

Ten thousand years hence, if the world lasts so long,
Tom Dogget must still be the theme of their song."

A greater actor than Dogget was Barton Booth, one of the most scholarly of tragedians, the creator of the title part in Addison's Cato, and the dear friend of Lord Bolingbroke, who was wont to send his chariot to the theatre every evening to convey the great man to the country. Pope has immortalized him in the lines:

"Booth enters: hark! the universal peal!

'But has he spoken?' Not a syllable.
'What shook the stage and made the people stare?
Cato's long wig, flower'd gown, and lacquer'd chair."

Booth was a gentleman by birth, a relation of the Earl of Warrington, and a prospective candidate for Holy Orders. When seventeen years old he ran away from home, and before very long, in 1698, had made his début on the Dublin stage as the dusky Oroonoko. The event was a triumph for the young actor, but, curiously enough, came very near being a dismal failure, because of an odd accident that befell him. The evening was very warm, and in the last scene of the

play, as he waited to go on, he unthinkingly wiped his darkened face, so that the lamp-black on it became streaked, and, as he afterward expressed it, gave him the appearance of a chimney-sweeper. Of course there was much laughter from the audience at sight of the strangely marked Oroonoko, but the next night when the performance was repeated, an actress fitted a crape mask to his face. As ill-luck would have it, this contrivance slipped off in the very first scene, and "Zounds!" subsequently related the tragedian, “I looked like a magpie! When I came off they lampblacked me for the rest of the night, so that I was flayed before it could be got off again."

Booth remained in Ireland nearly two years, and then began his long career of triumphs in London. In Dublin he had been an ardent lover of the flowing bowl, but the sad straits into which Powell had fallen as the result of drink made so distressful an impression on him that he completely reformed in this direction, and as he was naturally a student, possessed a melodious voice, great personal beauty, and an intuitive dramatic spirit, he quickly developed into an artist who in some respects was looked upon, and justly, as Betterton's

successor.

He seems to have had much of the latter's amiability of character, or, to quote a quaint passage from Chetwood, "he had a vast fund of understanding as well as good nature, and a persuasive elocution even in common discourse, that would even compel you to be

lieve him against your judgment of things." It appears, further, that "in his younger days he admired. none of the Heathen Deities so much as Jolly Bacchus ; to him he was very devout; yet, if he drank ever so deep, it never marr'd his study or his stomach. But, immediately after his marriage with Miss Santlow,* whose wise conduct, beauty, and winning behaviour so wrought upon him that home and her company were his chief happiness, he entirely contemn'd the folly of drinking out of season, and from one extreme fell, I think, into the other too suddenly; for his appetite for food had no abatement. I have often know Mrs. Booth, out of extreme tenderness to him, order the table to be removed, for fear of overcharging his stomach." Thus may we leave him to the care of the watchful Santlow.

*Miss Santlow, his second wife, was an attractive actress, once a ballet dancer.

O

CHAPTER VIII.

LOOKING IN AT THE OPERA.

NE of the most disturbing yet popular factors in

the theatrical life of Queen Anne's reign was the introduction, on an ambitious scale, of Italian opera. It proved disturbing because it filled with fear the jealous hearts of legitimate actors and managers, who saw in this thoroughly un-English and unusual form of amusement a dangerous rival; it was popular since it gave Londoners something melodious and quite different from the dramatic fare they were generally regaled with. Theatre-goers, even the best of them, like novelty, and so when this new-fangled operatic entertainment was brought into conservative Britain from across the sea it became quite the vogue, much to the sorrow of so critical an authority as Addison. It was a sorrow, too, which he expressed in season and out, and so we are not surprised when he announces, in the Spectator, his design "to deliver down to posterity a faithful account of the Italian opera, and of the gradual progress which it has made upon the English stage," for "there is no question," he thinks, “but our great-grandchildren will be very curious to know

the reason why their forefathers used to sit together like an audience of foreigners in their own country, and to hear whole plays acted before them, in a tongue which they did not understand."

Short-sighted Addison! The great-grandchildren had no such curiosity. They sat together themselves "like an audience of foreigners," and their own descendants do the same thing now. But to read on further from the Spectator:

Arsinoe was the first opera that gave us a taste of Italian music. The great success this opera met with produced some attempts of forming pieces upon Italian plans, which should give a more natural and reasonable entertainment than what can be met with in the elaborate trifles of that nation. This alarmed the poetasters and fiddlers of the town, who were used to deal in a more ordinary kind of ware; and therefore laid down an established rule, which is received as such to this day, 'That nothing is capable of being well set to music, that is not nonsense.' This maxim was no sooner received, but we immediately fell to translating the Italian operas, and as there was no great danger of hurting the sense of those extraordinary pieces, our authors would often make words of their own which were entirely foreign to the meaning of the passages they pretended to translate; their chief care being to make the numbers of the English verse answer to those of the Italian, that both of them might go to the same tune.”