to the adroitness of Bolingbroke. It gained him, however, the coveted position of patentee, and he shared, nearly to the end of his days, with Cibber and Wilks (Dogget retiring in disgust), the profits and perils of managerial proprietorship. Cato had a greater run " than was known to have been enjoyed by any piece acted until then, and reverting to the time at which it was produced, Colley Cibber exclaims, with retrospective enthusiasm, "This, then, was that happy period when both actors and managers were in their highest enjoyment of general content and prosperity. Now it was that the politer world, too, by their decent attention, their sensible taste, and their generous encouragements to authors and actors, once more saw that the stage, under a due regulation, was capable of being what the wisest ages thought it might be-the most rational scheme that human wit could form to dissipate with innocence the cares of life, to allure even the turbulent or ill-disposed from worse meditations, and to give the leisure hours of business and virtue. an instructive recreation." 1 Joys too bright to last! The remainder of Booth's life was for the most part tranquil and prosperous, if clouded towards the close by ill health. He lived long enough to know himself ranked among the masters of his art, and few successes could have pleased him more than the tribute paid to his fame by the Westminster boys, proud of the great actor whom their cloisters had sent forth. A few years before his death he had the satisfaction of hearing himself complimented in an epilogue to the annual Westminster play, one line of which declared that "Old Roscius to our Booth must bow," and with the mention of his name, the ancient dormitory, we may be sure, rang with applause. 1 Apology, p. 256. After the death of his first wife (the daughter of a Norfolk baronet), and the termination, under circumstances most honourable to him, of a subsequent liaison, Booth had married Hester Santlow (Gay's "Santlow famed for dance”), a beautiful danseuse who developed into an actress, and who, though she had been the mistress of the great Duke of Marlborough, made him a most excellent wife. He celebrated her charms and her merits in enthusiastic verse, some of it written, be it noted, years after marriage. She weaned him from his only vice, the bottle, and had to take care lest, as sometimes happens with modern votaries of socalled temperance, he did not rush from the extreme of drinking into the extreme of eating. "I have known Mrs Booth," says Chetwood, "out of extreme tenderness to him, order the table to be removed, for fear of overcharging his stomach." He died on the 10th of May 1733, a wealthy man, leaving much property in town and country, and was buried in the Church of Cowley, near Uxbridge, in Middlesex, where some of it lay. Nearly forty years afterwards, in 1772, his widow erected the monument in Poets' Corner. This is not the only memorial of him still surviving in the vicinity of the famous school where he first learned to be an Behind Westminster Abbey lurk two quaint little streets, running at right angles with each other, and the appearance of which, unchanged after the lapse of a century and a half, or more, bespeaks them of the age of Queen Anne, or of the first of the Georges. They were built by Booth, who called them Barton Street and Cowley Street, names that explain themselves, and which they still retain. actor. 66 We always think of Barton Booth as a scholar and a gentleman." He was apt to act carelessly when the house was thin. On one such occasion, and having suddenly exchanged languor for fire and energy, he replied, when afterwards asked the reason, "I saw an Oxford man in the pit for whose judgment I had more respect than for that of the rest of the audience "—an anecdote as characteristic as anything that has been recorded of him. "He was," we are told, "no great speaker in company, but when he did, it was in a grave, lofty way, not at all unlike his pronunciation on the stage." Theophilus Cibber (Colley's son) says, in his Memoir of Booth: "He had the deportment of a nobleman, and so well became a star and garter he seemed born to it." So long as histrionic success bestows celebrity, the name of Barton Booth will shine with a certain lustre of its own in the annals of the British stage. And, as Dean Stanley reminds us, "his surname has acquired a fatal celebrity from his descendant Wilks Booth, who followed in his ancestor's profession, and by the knowledge so gained, assassinated President Lincoln in Ford's Theatre at Washington, on Good Friday 1865." IN IX. JOHN BYROM.* N the year 1725, "the town" rang one summer day with an epigram which had appeared in the papers of the morning, and which has since become classical. Few people remember the Treaty of Vienna, concluded in that year, or the rumours produced by it of a coming European conflict, in which the belligerents of the Spanish Succession war were to change partners, and Spain and Germany to be ranged against England and France. But thanks to this epigram everybody remembers the bloodless, though not inkless, war of 1725, between the English partisans of Handel the celebrated, and his Italian rival, Bononcini, the otherwise forgotten. An illustration, which no amount of use and familiarity seems to hackney, is still borrowed by speakers and writers from the well-known lines :— "Some say, compared to Bononcini, That Mynheer Handel's but a ninny, Is scarcely fit to hold a candle : Strange all this difference should be 'Twixt Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee!" The wits of London attributed the epigram to the great Dr Swift, at or about that time deep in the composition of *The Private Journal and Literary Remains of John Byrom; edited by Richard Parkinson, D.D. (Manchester, 1854-7.), being vols. xxxii., xxxiv., xl., and xliv. of the Chetham Society's publications. Byrom's Miscellaneous Poems (Leeds, 1814). Biographia Britannica, § John Byrom. Chalmers's English Poets (London, 1810), vol. xv. Monk's Life of Bentley (London, 1830.) Victor Schoelcher's Life of Handel. The Spectator. Gibbon's Autobiography, &c. "Gulliver." It has often since been printed in Swift's works, and Handel's latest biographer reproaches Swift with its authorship. Speaking, not many years ago, of the feud between the Handelists and the Bononcinists, M. Victor Schoelcher refers to the famous lines, and says querulously : "Swift, who admired nothing, and who had no ear, wrote an epigram upon the subject"-and for his own part, M. Schoelcher considers "the angry injustice of the nobles" who caballed against Handel, "far preferable to the empty eclecticism of the Dean of St Patrick's." Handel's biographer might have saved himself the trouble of throwing this stone at "the Dean of St Patrick's." Though the epigram may be very much "in the manner of Dr Swift," yet in reality it is none of his. Its author was undoubtedly John Byrom, a Lancashire man, and one of the first natives of his county who gained a position in the literature of his country. Byrom's verse figured in the old-fashioned, manyvolumed collections of the English poets; his life is in the "Biographia Britannica"; the system of short-hand which he invented makes him conspicuous in the annals of stenography. He was a man of mark in his day and generation; while of late years attention has been recalled to him, and new light been thrown on his character and career, through the discovery of his private journal, and its appearance among the publications of the Chetham Society. John Byrom merits a place in any Gallery of Lancashire Worthies, and the details which he has given of himself in his journal, lighten in some respects the task of the delineator. The Byroms were what the biographers of last century called "a genteel family," belonging to the lesser squirearchy, and they contributed to the fashionable world of London, in the first half of the eighteenth century, a "Beau Byrom," who wasted his substance about town, and is still faintly remembered as a predecessor of the Nashes |