A Hundred Years Ago
THE " SPECTATOR," DECEMBER 297n, 1832. THE PANTOMIMES.
Pantomimes will always be popular so long as they are founded upon some fairy tale or nursery legend. And we have observed that they have generally been successful in proportion to the skill with which the introductory story has been dramatized. This is the " Child's Own Play.' He sees realized, in a palpable form, the visions which the story-books " conjured up, and that flitted before his fancy's sight till the play-ground has become an enchanted land, and the fairies have come and beckoned him at the school- room window ; or the ogre, in the awful form of some fat farmer, has stalked up to him with a club-like cudgel as he lay half asleep in the midst of the tall wheat dreaming of Little Jack or Tom Thumb. The rural localities of the fairy wonders, too, are appropriate as well as pleasant. The spacious kitchen of the farm-house or the snug cottage, is the favourite scene of the gambols of the " good people." Country superstitions and old customs are a good back ground on which to exhibit the innocent marvels of the fairy-tale. The mixture of realm canes with the " gorgeous hydras and chimeras " of fairy land, is not incongruous in its effect. The impossibility is manifest ; the veil of the fiction is transparent ; but the deception is an honest one, and the moral invariably wholesome,
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