New triumphs awaited him. In the burlesque of "The Yellow Dwarf," he showed a mastery of the grotesque which approached the terrible. Years before, in _Macbeth_, he had personated a red-headed, fire-eating, whiskey-drinking Scotchman,--and in _Shylock_, a servile, fawning, obsequious, yet, when emergency arose, a passionate and vindictive Jew. In the _Yellow Dwarf_ he was the jaundiced embodiment of a spirit of Oriental evil: crafty, malevolent, greedy, insatiate,--full of mockery, mimicry, lubricity, and spite,--an Afrit, a Djinn, a Ghoul, a spawn of Sheitan. How that monstrous orange-tawny head grinned and wagged! How those flaps of ears were projected forwards, like unto those of a dog! How balefully those atrabilious eyes glistened! You laughed, and yet you shuddered. He spoke in mere doggerel and slang. He sang trumpery songs to negro melodies. He danced the Lancashire clog-hornpipe; he rattled out puns and conundrums; yet did he contrive to infuse into all this mummery and buffoonery, into this salmagundi of the incongruous and the _outré_, an unmistakably tragic element,--an element of depth and strength and passion, and almost of sublimity. The mountebank became inspired. The Jack Pudding suddenly drew the _cothurnus_ over his clogs. You were awe-stricken by the intensity, the vehemence, he threw into the mean balderdash of the burlesque-monger. These qualities were even more apparent in his subsequent personation of _Medea_, in Robert Brough's parody of the Franco-Italian tragedy. The love, the hate, the scorn, of the abandoned wife of _Jason_, the diabolic loathing in which she holds _Creüsa_, the tigerish affection with which she regards the children whom she is afterwards to slay,--all these were portrayed by Robson, through the medium, be it always remembered, of doggerel and slang, with astonishing force and vigor. The original _Medea_, the great Ristori herself, came to see Robson, and was delighted with and amazed at him. She scarcely understood two words of English, but the actor's genius struck her home through the bull's-hide target of an unknown tongue. _"Uomo straordinario!"_ she went away saying.
I have anticipated the order of his successes, but at this distance of time and places I can keep no chronological count of them. Robson has always alternated the serio-comic burlesque with pure farce, and after _Jem Baggs_ his brightest hits have been in the deaf ostler in "Boots at the Swan" and the discharged criminal in "Retained for the Defence." In the burlesque of "Masaniello," he had an opportunity--which some thought would prove a magnificent one to him--of showing the grotesque side of insanity; but, for some reason or other, the part seemed distasteful to him. It may have been repugnant to his eminently sensitive spirit to exhibit the ludicrous aspect of the most dreadful of human infirmities. _A peste, fame, bello, et dementia libera nos, Domine!_ Perhaps the piece itself was weak. At all events, "Masaniello" had but a brief run. A drunken man, a jealous man, a deaf man, a fool, a vagabond, a demon, a tyrant, Robson could marvellously depict: in the crazy Neapolitan fisherman he either failed or was unwilling to excel. I had been for a long period extremely solicitous to see Robson undertake the part of _Sir Giles Overreach_ in "A New Way to pay Old Debts." You know that _Sir Giles_, after the discovery of the obliterated deed, goes stark staring mad. I should have wished to see him assume Edmund Kean's own character in the real play itself; but Robson was nervous of venturing on a purely "legitimate" _rôle_. I was half persuaded to write a burlesque on "A New Way to pay Old Debts," and Robson had promised to do his very best with _Sir Giles_; but a feeling, half of laziness, and half of reverence for the fine old drama, came over me, and I never got farther than the first scene.