He had distanced the whole diplo matic field by a wig. His wig had come from Paris; the fac-simile of the favourite peruke of the Ambassador. It was the famous wig in which Talleyrand had sworn thirteen successive oaths of allegiance to as many successive shapes of French government. What might have happened to the daring comedian, the protesting manager, the alarmed cabinet, nay, to the trembling empire itself, if Talleyrand had frowned, is now beyond calculation; but, to the astonishment of ministers, the first man whom they saw in the opposite box was the old diplomate himself, laughing heartily at the entrée of Farren. The costume, the wig, the man, were there perfect-all but the wisdom and the wit. Lords Grey and Palmerston felt their alarms subside as the performance went on; and before the fall of the curtain, the repose of Europe was secured-at least till the arrival of a new ambassador.

One

Managers hear odd things of monarchs as well as of ministers. evening of the King's (William the Fourth) coming to the theatre, as Liston and the manager were conversing in the ante-room of the royal box with a nobleman of the household, one of the pages passing by, and not observing his Lordship, slapped the comedian on the back, ejaculating, "D'ye think you'll make him laugh to-night? He was devilish stupid at dinner!" I cannot now determine which created the greater roar, the face of the lackey on perceiving the noble lord before whom he had so committed himself, or the face of Liston. "If the reader," Mr Bunn slyly remarks, "never saw the face of a dignified performer, when reminded that he was nothing more than a performer, he has a treat to come."

He gives another little example, infinitely expressive of what he calls a dignified performer. "The King had ordered the play of The School for Scandal' at our house, and some other performances, of which the farce of Turning the Tables' was the last, at Drury Lane. Of course all the leading performers were called on.

"At Covent Garden all complied, with one exception; this exception was Mr Macready, whom no argument or request could prevail upon to appear in Joseph Surface,' though he had so often perform

ed the character before. A journal of the following morning thus touched on the subject:- We cannot avoid mentioning a point which was the general subject of conversation yesterday evening-that Braham had volunteered his gratuitous services, and Macready declined to play 'Joseph Surface' before his sovereign. This is what we call 'sovereign contempt.' But the onus falls on the mimic, and not on the monarch. What sad nonsense this is! With all the respect that we can possibly have for the art and artist, it is a fact

requiring no comment, that as they both depend on the breath of the King, his

very breath should summon them into action.'

"The arrangements of the plays being made by the vice-chamberlain, the manager had no power to alter them; and this was the letter which he received from the comedian.

"Dear Sir-I perceive by the advertisements that "Turning the Tables" is to be performed as the last piece on Tuesday next. This, I trust, will not be persisted in, otherwise I must decline the honour of appearing before his Majesty so late in the evening-Yours,

'J. LISTON.""

All this is certainly ultra-comic. "Now, pray," says Mr Bunn, "who is the king in all this business? Mr Liston had L.20 for playing in " Turning the Tables," commanded by his Majesty to be the last entertainment of the evening. It is not too late in the evening for the King of England to sit in the theatre, but it is too late for one of his Majesty's servants to appear on the stage! Surely this is carrying out the Wolseyan doctrine of

Ego et rex meus' a little too far. The actual meaning of it is-don't you think that, on coming on the stage at half past eleven at night, his Majesty, who has been so heartily laughing at the other pieces, will not have a titter left for me? Talk for a thousand years, and the latent meaning will be found to be this, and nothing else."

Whatever was the meaning, his Majesty would have lost some honest laughing by Liston's non-appearance. He is the best quiet comedian that we remember. This style, we admit, is not regarded as his forte by the world, nor perhaps altogether by himself; for nothing moves the populace but buffooneries, and the actor must have peculiar strength of mind who does not barter his judgment for huzzas.

But a hundred others can equal Liston in setting the rabble in a roar. His exclusive province is calm drollery; the laugh which he excites without exhibiting, and the easy pungency in which the sarcasm is shot, apparently without taking aim at any one. He now comes forward but seldom, and we regret the loss of a genuine comedian, in the impoverished state of stage ability. But if he can get £60 a-week for walking through French vaudevilles, stript of their lightness, the only thing good about them; and incapable of common sense, the only thing that their translators could give them; we feel but little surprise that he should be more alive to salary than fame. And in this, he plays a part set before him by many a man in a much higher station.

she was justly regarded as possessing attractions for the London audience. But it is surprising how quickly and how completely those young creatures, fair, or brown, learn the art of making a bargain. Malibran demanded no less than £125 a night for nineteen nights; and what is not less surprising, obtained her demand, amounting to £2375 for six weeks' singing and playing! being £375 for three night's performance in the week; and that too, paid every Monday morning, and in advance. But even this was not all: an arrangement, by which she was to appear on seven extra nights at Covent Garden, (both theatres being now under one management,) produced £1088 more, making a total of £3463 for twenty-six nights, or about two months' performances! A year, at this rate, would have produced to her upwards of £20,000. A pretty sum for singing! And though the theatre did not give her this, it is not improbable, that between benefits, private concerts, country engagements, and douceurs, she carried off little less than that sum within the time. We know the folly of expecting the opulent to think of any thing in the expenditure of their money but their own amusement; yet this prodigality might make a rational mind reflect a little, whether British wealth was given to pamper every craving foreign profligate who can sing and play in any thing so foolish as a foreign opera. The exertion is so worthless the recompense so beyond all bounds! Here was a little creature, who, though certainly clever, was but a singer after all, and even there, by no means first-rate; yet this woman is suffered to lay her grasp on a sum four times that of the income of one of the judges of the land-of a commander-in-chief-of a minister of state-of the average income of the bishops-ten times that of the average profits of the bar, and enough to have pensioned a whole province of the clergy. Mr Bunn is evidently a Fanatico per la Malibran ! yet, struck as he may have been by her general performances, his narrative of her conduct leaves an impression wholly unamiable on the mind. With all her appearance of enthusiasm and simplicity, she seems to have been one of the most craving of possible beings, always writing letters of af

All authorship has its perils; but what must stage authorship be, which has successively to run the knout under the hands of the manager, the examiner, and the actor; with the public, only waiting its exhibition, to sweep it into oblivion! To take the case of the actor-Mr Bunn, and Kenney the well-known and clever dramatist, had prepared a farce called "A Good-Looking Fellow," in which a part was written for Liston. The comedian returned the MS., with the following very decided note:"Dear sir, I have read the piece very attentively, and regret that I cannot concur with Messrs Harris, Reynolds, Kenney, and yourself, as to its merits. My opinion is, that it would be inevitably dd in less than a quarter of an hour; and as I really lack the courage to risk being pelted off the stage, I must beg to decline the ac quaintance of Mr Narcissus Briggs. Yours, J. LISTON."

This was decided, but not decisive; for the manager, being also the author, and having a parental feeling for his babe, transferred Mr Narcissus into the hands of Harley. The farce was received with great laughter, and was played twenty-six nights, though at the latest period of the season. "Very facetious, but not very prophetic," fairly enough observes Mr Bunn.

The next "grande enterprise" of this very enterprising manager, was the engagement of Malibran. This singer and actress had acquired sudden reputation on the foreign stage, and

fected feeling, but real avarice; and while sitting under an influx of wealth, that must have astonished her at the absurdity and lavishness of the country-soliciting, striving, and grasping with the covetousness of a real miser. While thousands were thus pouring in upon her, she writes to the manager as if she was not worth a shilling on earth; and accustomed as she had been to little better than beggary in her own impoverished country, and in the tours of that wandering and unprosperous personage, her father Garcia the singer, she swallowed money with more than Israelitish avidity. Her death, four years since, (1836,) excited a public sensation from its melancholy circumstances, and from the public outcry at De Beriot, the violin player, whom she called her husband, though M. Malibran was living. What has become of her wealth we know not, unless it is in De Beriot's hands. She never enjoyed it herself. She had no time to enjoy it; and thus, after a brief career of excessive toil and excessive grasping, the whole fruit of her miserably anxious life and exhausting labours may have gone only to fatten a Dutch fiddler. So much for moneymaking.

We have a similar instance in the salary of Taglioni. A woman whose sole merit is that she dances well-of all merits the least meritorious-is actually fêted throughout Europe-received at the tables of emperors and empresses -huzzaed by courts--presented with a purse of diamonds by one superopulent fool-and with a chariot with solid silver spokes to its wheels by another; demanding for a few nights of pirouetting and bounding at the Italian opera-a sum which would feed the peasantry of a province for a month; and amassing money which might raise the drooping sculpture, painting, music, and literature of an empire.

What was the engagement which Taglioni had the modesty to demand in the theatre of Drury Lane? One hundred pounds a-night for herself, three nights a-week, and L.600 to be paid for the services of her father as balletmaster; L.900 to her brother and sister to dance with her, with two benefits for herself, guaranteed to her at L.1000, and half a benefit to her brother, guaranteed at L.200-in all

L.6000! All this is monstrous; it actually disgusts the mind to think of such sums being lavished on a parcel of jumpers-even the effrontery of the demand is offensive. Here a knot of the meanest of mankind-the very dross of Parisian life-actually think their caperings worthy of being paid at a rate which the liberality of nations has scarcely ever offered to their greatest benefactors. The noblest poet, the most profound philosopher, the greatest mechanical inventor, the most gallant soldier, all would be regarded as exorbitantly overpaid by half the sum which those vulgar and frivolous contributors to the cupidity of the Italian opera think themselves entitled to demand, and by the prodigal folly of fashion actually obtain. The remedy for this gross offence does not lie with managers. It must come from the nobility and from the sovereign. So long as their patronage is thus wasted on the foreign stage, so long will these "dancing families" come over here to gather all that they can. Of course, it would be ridiculous to suppose that all this was filial piety on the part of the Terpsichore herself. The family of the danseuse were her shadow, the L.6000 was virtually the payment for the saltatory exploits of one exhibitor. The only remedy for this imputation on the national understanding, is to cultivate the national drama; and this is to be done, only by enabling the managers of the great theatres to pay for it; and this is to be done only by retracing those steps which a vulgar and shortsighted liberality, as it is called, took to the ruin of every thing respectable in the shape of theatrical property. There must be dramatic ability in England; for there never was a real demand for ability of any kind which was not answered. If Shakspeare and Sheridan are at an unapproachable height-and even this too may be only a conjecture; the genius of Otway and Southerne, Young, and Rowe, or of Morton, Reynolds, and Colman, is not of so colossal an order as to make every thing else dwindle under its shade. And yet those writers contrived to fill up the theatrical vacancies of their day remarkably to the public gratification, made the drama highly popular; and while those cheerers of the last century followed the improving manners of the age, and cleared the stage of

the offences of the days of Charles II., they left behind them the only dramas which the public can still endure. If we are to have a national theatre, we must try the old tactique; extinguish the minor theatres, which have so to tally failed as schools of the drama; and thus, bringing the demands of actors within rational bounds, bring back original talent to the authorship of the stage.

As we have mentioned Malibran's marriage with De Beriot, we give, for the benefit of all friends of police-office marriages in England, the form of managing these matters among the enlightened of other nations calling themselves Christians.

"Hereby is declared null and of no effect the marriage contracted on the 23d of March 1826, at New York, between Marie Felicite Garcia, born in Paris 24th of March 1808, and Francis Eugene Louis Malibran, born at Paris 15th November 1778, before Charles Louis d'Espenville, cousul of France at New York. In consequence, the woman Garcia will have this judgment registered," &c.

This is a summary way of doing things, and we have no doubt must be regarded by the "illumined" as a very satisfactory style of getting rid of the trammels of matrimony; it accounts also for the fact, that many a foreign fair has half a dozen husbands living at a time.

The reader is probably acquainted with the works of Mr Colley Grattan, author of the "Highways and Byeways," and other clever and amusing performances; but he would be defrauded of some of his fame were his good-humour unchronicled. We know no stronger instance in point than the following :-" During a residence at Boulogne, he had rendered himself so very agreeable to his landlady and her family, that, on his being about to take his leave, she expressed great regret, saying, that she had at first taken a prejudice against him, but such had been the urbanity of his manners, that she had even got over his nose, (a feature of whose beauty it would be difficult to boast.) That is impossible, my good lady,' said he,

for my nose has no bridge to it.'" This was certainly pushing French observation of mankind rather far, but the good-humour of the answer went farther.

We must now leave the topic of theatres and managers. Their detail, in these volumes, is that of a vexed man, but of an ingenious and an intelligent one. His book, on the whole, is very amusing, and we suppose that it will be in the hands of every one who talks, thinks, or cares about theatres.

We have long entertained a grow ing opinion that a knowledge of the Celtic languages is essential to the study of European philology, and that the ignorance under which we individually labour in this respect, is no less disgraceful than detrimental. In that belief, we have been irreversibly confirmed by a perusal of the interesting work which supplies the title and the subject of this article. It proceeds from the pen of Mr Lachlan M'Lean,

the well-known author of the "Historical Account of Iona," and of other productions devoted to the noble purpose of exalting his native "nook of earth" to a proud pre-eminence over the rest of the universe. The work is dedicated, apparently by permission, to Sir Robert Peel, and affords evidence, at least equally demonstrative of the good-natured courtesy of that eminent statesman, as of his high appreciation of Celtic antiquities.

We submit this notice of Mr M'Lean's book, with no idea that we are entitled to review it; but intending in an humble and teachable spirit to point out some of its most striking passages, and to communicate to our readers some of the instruction or amusement which it has afforded to ourselves. So great, indeed, is our impatience to proclaim its merits to the world, that we have not even waited to acquire a thorough understanding of its principles, which we fear could only have been accomplished after a much longer delay than the rules of Maga would readily permit. Mr M Lean himself seems aware, that, like other great acquisitions, his theory is not to be mastered without a due degree of labour. "If any person," he says, "take up the History of the Celtic Language, as about to be submitted, and expect to get through it as through a song, for that person the author has not written: Intelligibilia non intellectum adfero." This is strong ly put, but we shall see how it is borne out in the sequel. We only entreat our readers to do as we ourselves have done; and if they meet with any thing obscure in our extracts, to believe that the defect is rather in their own intelligence than in our author's intelligibility. For our parts, we shall be content for the most part to let Mr M'Lean speak for himself, and shall only make such connecting explanations or supplementary comments as may best set off the excellencies of our "great original."

The title-page of the work must have prepared our readers for things worthy of that high announcement; and the preface does not diminish the excitement of so great expectations. Perhaps Mr M Lean has in this respect disregarded the Horatian rule, which inculcates a modesty of exordium. But we are not sure that the precepts of epic poetry can safely be applied to historical compositions, or at least to histories of the Celtic language; and on the principle of a bird in the hand being worth two elsewhere, we feel comparatively indifferent as to the ulterior pages of a work where, in the very preface, we are put in immediate possession of eloquence and wisdom, of a character so unusual as is exhibited in the following passage:

"At the commencement of the present order of material things, the first sun indi

cated day by a faint but perceptible heraldic emanation in the East, gradually waxing stronger and stronger, till now, behold! the king of day himself gilding the summit of the mountains with the splendour of his countenance, and now gradually mounting, and diffusing stronger light-stronger intelligence-till he arrives at the goal of noon. This appears to the author no inapt emblem of the commenceof the order of things in the moral world. If we would contemplate the human family in its infant state, we must turn our backs upon this hemisphere, and travel to the East to see the dawn of intellect,

and there listen to the efforts of infant

humanity forming a language; we must learn the powers of their signs and symbolsa giant alphabet—and attend to the reduction of these rudiments to practice. In brief, we must contemplate man as naked."

We pass over the poetical beauty and close coherence of these observations, to notice their peculiar propriety in reference to the subject under consideration. "If we would contemplate the human family in its infant state," "we must contemplate man as naked." The truth of the proposition is less remarkable than its adaptation to the author's purpose. must contemplate man as naked, how is this to be done? The usages of ordinary society are unfavourable to such contemplations; and the natives of Australia can only be reached by "turning our backs upon this hemisphere," not figuratively, but in earnest.

If we

But we are not, therefore, to despair. If we cannot contemplate man in a state of absolute nudity, we must be content to take him in the nearest approximation to it that circumstances admit; and, fortunately for philology, the costume of our Celtic countrymen enables us, with little trouble, and at less expense, to prosecute our discoveries in this direction as far as the most enthusiastic enquirer would desire. By this means, we are exempted from the necessity of à priori speculations, where the opposite mode of argument is so fully illustrated and so constantly suggested by all that we see. Mr M'Lean's reasoning on this subject is quite irresistible. The object to be attained, is an exposition of the original state of man, of which nudity was a fundamental feature. It is undeniable that this element is more conspicuous in the country of the kilt