Similar groups are met with at every step. At the door of almost every gin-shop you see drunken women, many of them with children in their arms; and wherever you go, amidst the confused noise and murmur of many voices, you hear distinctly the most awful oaths. It is not at all necessary to quote those oaths. Let it suffice, that one of them, beginning with a B, startled Dr. Keif's ears a hundred times at least in his walk through Drury-lane.
"Adventure number one!" said Mr. Baxter, to whom our friend communicated the result of his observations.
The fact is, Dr. Keif and Mr. Baxter are seated in the pit of the Olympic Theatre, which is small enough to enable even a short-sighted person to make the public in the boxes and the galleries the subject of a physiognomical study. The "Caucasian population" of Mr. Disraeli's novels may be seen in large numbers enjoying their sabbath. The pit and the upper gallery are filled with sentimental cooks and housemaids, intermixed with a sprinkling of females, to whom we do but justice if we describe them as _lorettes_ in a small way. They enjoy the patronage of a select assembly of beardless shopmen and attorneys' clerks, who treat them to ginger-beer, soda-water, lemonade, and oranges. The curtain has just fallen.
"Wait one moment, I want to look at some one I know. Am I to understand that you didn't like the piece?" said Mr. Baxter.
"On the contrary; I like it very much. There's nothing like a piece of tragical clap-trap in your English theatres."
"Ay!--well!--just so! But then the piece was 'done' from the French."
"The natural source of the modern British drama. But never mind the piece; it's the _acting_ which amuses me. Mrs. Lackaday telling young Ronsay of her boding dream, and Ronsay pitching into her with a declaration of love--you must confess that the scene would have done credit to the most wooden marionettes."
"Was'nt it! The fellow stood there, like a big gun, until his turn came, and then he went off! He turned his eyes upwards, that you might have seen the whites at the distance of a mile; and he sparred with his hands, as if preparing for a set-to with the moon; and all of a sudden he stood stock still again, exactly like a gun, and the audience was fairly enraptured! And did it not strike you, that the two people had the same modulation and declamation, as a married couple of forty years' standing, whose features have acquired the same expression, and whose limbs have fallen into the same mode of movement? At times I am inclined to believe, that the tragic actors, male and female, have been ground their trade to the tune of one and the same patent barrel-organ. Their pathos is set to music. They all delight in the same pause between the article, the adjective, and the substantive; they all make endless stops, and utter the word which follows with a kind of explosion. I presume these poor fellows try to imitate Macready."