It would seem that there still lingers some of that
ima- ginative confidentialness between the actor and his audience which is always expressed in prologues and epilogues, and a shadow of which has passed into literature in the addresses once frequent from the author to his "gentle reader." In the Adelphi Theatre, at Birmingham, last Saturday, most curious confidences were made by the clown, and sprites, and other personages in the ,pantomime to the " gods " in the gallery, while the manager pleaded his cause against them, and the" gods "raised a copper subscription for the sprite who danced so energetically for them without having either, as he said, his wages, or the immediate hope of them. It began in the clown knocking at the doctor's door without receiving answer, when he exclaimed, "The doctor's struck," and immedi- ately came forward and poured forth the actors' grievances to the audience. After this confession the entertainment went on till it came to one of the clown's jumps, when, finding the person decamped who ought to have received him, he remonstrated anxiously with some one outside the stage and declined to break his neck. After this the audience seem to have been taken freely into confidence, to have played a very conspicuous part in the remainder of the drama, raising, as we said, an impromptu subscription for a devoted sprite, who danced
about among the naked iron frameworks where lights and fairies ought to have been as cheerfully as if the illusion was complete. He deserved the money, if only for the extraordinary conquest obtained by his sympathy with the audience over his feelings as an artist: It must have been more wounding to him as an artist to dance amid the bare machinery than for Mr. Cooper to exhibit his bare cattle without Mr. Lee's landscape-background, in mere justice to the feelings of expecting spectators.
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