_Hip._ 'Tis my maternal tenderness that speaks: As yet no whiskery down adorns his cheeks.
_Man._ I'll hear no more! talk not of down to me-- The boy's as downy as a boy need be.
In the year following the publication of "The Castle of Otranto," the "Vicar of Wakefield" was given to the world. It appears to have escaped travestie until 1885, when--thinking more, no doubt, of Mr. Wills's "Olivia" than of Goldsmith's _chef d'oeuvre_--Messrs. Stephens and Yardley brought out at the Gaiety "The Vicar of Wideawakefield," in which Mr. Arthur Roberts and Miss Laura Linden sought, not unsuccessfully, to reproduce and heighten some of the artistic peculiarities of Mr. Irving and Miss Ellen Terry. Mrs. Shelley's "Frankenstein," published in 1818, received its first dramatic _reductio ad absurdum_ in 1849, when the Brothers Brough made it the subject of a burlesque;--its second in 1887, when Messrs. "Richard Henry" turned out at the Gaiety a travestie, of which I shall have something to say in my next chapter. In the Broughs' version Wright was Frankenstein and Paul Bedford the Monster, and much fun was made out of the finishing touches which Frankenstein gave to his work. "O." Smith, Miss Woolgar, and Miss Chaplin were also in the cast.
Sir Walter Scott's novels have obtained a fair amount of notice from the comic dramatists. "Ivanhoe," for example, has exercised the humorous powers of three--of Robert Brough (at the Haymarket in 1850), of H. J. Byron (at the Strand in 1862), and of T. F. Plowman (at the Court in 1871). Byron (who called his work "Ivanhoe in accordance with the Spirit of the Times"[50]) had the aid of Miss Charlotte Saunders as his Wilfred, of Charles Rice as his Brian de Bois-Guilbert, of "Johnny" Clarke as his Isaac of York, of Miss Eleanor Bufton as his Black Knight, of Miss Swanborough as Rowena, of Jenny Rogers as his Rebecca, and of Miss Polly Marshall, Miss Fanny Hughes, and Poynter in other parts. In the provinces he was his own Isaac of York.
[50] This burlesque has been used, during the present year, as the foundation for a travestie played by the Cambridge Amateur Dramatic Company, under the title of "Ivanhoe à la Carte" (in allusion to Mr. D'Oyly Carte's production of Sir Arthur Sullivan's "Ivanhoe"). To this adaptation, it is said, new lyrics were contributed by Messrs. J. K. Stephen and R. C. Lehmann.