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events, Mary Anne had a brief career, almost unrecorded, upon what are called "the boards," and suddenly she bloomed as the possessor of a great house in Gloucester Place, keeping ten horses and twenty servants, "including three professed men-cooks," whatever that may mean. She received large sums of money for her influence in obtaining appointments in the army, and somehow the Duke of York made the appointments, although he was acquitted by Parliament of the charge of corruption preferred against him. Perhaps the Duke was only an easy-going dupe, misguided by his fondness for the fair Clarke, and I do not propose to try his case over again at this late day, for I am glad that he escaped conviction, because he did much for the comfort of the soldiers and for the general improvement of the service, despite his inefficiency as a military commander. As for Mary Anne, her acceptance of £7000 and a pension of £400 a year for suppressing her edition of the royal lover's letters makes me think that she was not as much entitled to our admiration as poor Dora Jordan, the mistress of William IV, who, as far as I can find out, never did harm to any one.

There is a distinction between theatrical literature and dramatic literature, as Mr. Robert Lowe points out in his Bibliographical Account.

Dramatic literature deals with the plays and theatrical literature with the players and not the plays themselves. I confess that I am weary of the dramatic, of the interminable controversies concerning Shakespeare - Bacon, and of the innumerable essays on the playwrights of the olden time. As Lord Beaconsfield advised a young man seeking his counsel never to ask who wrote the "Letters of Junius," I would urge a friend never to suggest a doubt about the fact that Shakespeare wrote his own plays. One might as well discuss the tariff or the currency; deadly boredom lies in all such topics.

I prefer to recur to modern days, and to take down from the shelf just behind the writingdesk the volume of Lester Wallack's Memories of Fifty Years. How delightful it is for a fairly old New-Yorker to recall the days when the handsome Lester was our object of sincere adoration, the preux chevalier of the stage, the one actor who attracted the love and the admiration of all of us adolescents. No one can now rival him in our middle-aged affections. I am not one of those who are always prating about the superiority of the actors of by-gone days, for I find many who carry forward the ancient traditions, but Lester Wallack was unapproachable in his peculiar sphere; he was always a gentleman on the stage, and unaffectedly so, relying on no tricks of costume or affectations of speech. For this reason we boys who used to save our quarters to buy an occasional seat in the old theatre at Broadway and Thirteenth Street learned how to behave ourselves, although we did not have the chance of doing all those delightful things which Wallack did so gracefully, because, somehow, we never found ourselves in such delightful situations. Had we been able to encounter the simple problems presented in the Wallack plays we were confident that we could have borne off the laurels just as easily and as jauntily as Lester Wallack bore them. I used to dream of his sidewhiskers, so contemporaneous and convincing; and his legs were almost poetic. Who that ever saw him in "Rosedale," or in "The Veteran," or in any of the standard plays which are never produced in these degenerate times, can ever forget him!

It is probable that play-goers of this generation would stare in dissatisfied astonishment at the plays and players of forty years ago and call them stupid and prosy. That is the experience of all times, and the luxurious Roman who sat in bored silence through the "Heauton-Timoroumenos" of the popular Publius Terentius Afer may have regretted "The Frogs" of Aristophanes. Our revered fathers used to shake their heads even at Wallack, and thought that all the dramatic performances of the sixties were degenerate. So we have with us even now the praisers of past times who sneer at Ternina, Nordica, and Melba, and tell us how much better Jenny Lind was, and how infinitely superior the piping tones of Mario were to the manly notes of Jean de Reszke. We gray-bearded devotees of reminiscence easily recall the alleged wickedness of a certain play called "The Black Crook," wherein the loveliness of the female form divine was displayed in a liberal, gorgeous, and spectacular fashion, but when we compare it with the present-day productions of burlesques and operettas, the light artillery of the drama, the old show seems almost Diana-like in its modesty. Whither are we tending? When I dream of what may come three decades hence I am inclined to hide myself in the retired precincts of the Century Club and blush furiously. It is all a matter of custom, but I cannot help feeling a sense of sorrow at the decline of good taste when I put in parallel columns the coarse and common crudities of Weber and Fields and the sweet dignity of the plays which used to fill the old Wallack Theatre with crowds of cultured people. Yet I go to Weber & Fields', and I laugh at their ridiculous antics, while at home I sigh over the decline of the theatre and mourn over the departed glories of the legitimate drama.

I find in my copy of Lester Wallack's Memories a fairly curious document signed with the name of Colley Cibber in his own autograph, which I picked up at an auction sale, and which, with some fifty others, has been inlaid by Mr. Moore, of Bradstreet's, and bound up in company with many portraits. It reads:

"Property Bill, Saturday, Nov. ye 12th, Friday. Lancashire Witches

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Here is also the programme of that performance of "Hamlet" given in Wallack's honor on the evening of May 21, 1888, when, with Booth and Barrett, Frank Mayo and John Gilbert, in the company, Joseph Jefferson appeared as First Grave - digger and Florence as Second Gravedigger. It bears the pencilled inscription, "John Gilbert; Lester Wallack, with best wishes," bringing back the memory of one of the most sterling men and accomplished actors of his day.

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