COLLEY CIBBER'S " APOLOGY."*

THERE appears to be a demand just now for fine editions, and Mr. Nimmo understands how to supply it. These are two beautiful volumes, "printed on fine double-edge demy 8vo paper for England and America," with twenty-six original mezzotint portraits by R. B. Parkes, "as India proofs after letters," and eighteen etchings by Adolph Lalauze. Five hundred and ten copies of the Apology are printed in this form, and if Cibber could have known how his book would be honoured a hundred and fifty years after its publication, his vanity would have been even greater than it was.- Vanity is a comfortable fault to the possessor, and a high opinion of himself kept Colley Cibber in good humour with the world through a long and by no means tranquil career. Pope's anger got the better of his judgment when he deposed Theobald and placed "King Colley " on the throne of dullness. (libber's faults were many, but stupidity was not one of them. He was a successful comedian, a successful dramatist, a good • An Apology fur the Life of Colley Caber. Written by Himself. A New Edition, with Notes and Supplement, by Robert W. Lowe. With Portraits and Etchings. 2 vols. London: N'immo. 1889. stage manager, and, as it has been justly said, "an unequalled critic of theatrical performances." It must be admitted that Cibber made an execrable poet. The last age produced a great deal of bad verse, but to surpass the Laureate in this respect was impossible. The ridicule poured upon his odes

by Fielding was amply justified, and Johnson laughed, as well he might, at the couplet,—

" Perched on the eagle's soaring wing, The lowly linnet loves to sing."

Indeed, Cibber himself attributed his appointment as suc- cessor to Eusden to his Whig principles. He acknow- ledged the weakness of his poetry, and he also confessed his inability to write good English. Fielding attacks the Laureate's style again and again, and not without reason ; but Cibber, while frankly admitting that he sometimes wrote nonsense, prefers this "frolicsome fault" to the sense of "flat writers." If he writes more carelessly than others, it is because he has a warmer imagination :-

"I grant," he says, "that no man worthy the name of an author is a more faulty writer than myself; that I am not master of my own language I too often feel when I am at a loss for expression. I know, too, that I have too bold a disregard for that correctness which others set so just a value upon. This I ought to be ashamed of, when I find that persons of colder imaginations are allowed to write better than myself. Whenever I speak of any- thing that highly delights me, I find it very difficult to keep my words within the bounds of common sense. Even when I write, too, the same failing will sometimes get the better of me."

It is evident that ridicule, even when it came from a

Fielding or a Pope, was wasted upon a man so self-satisfied as Colley Cibber, who was, as he said, "unmoved by blows that might have felled an oak." Indeed, his indifference enabled him to turn the tables on his antagonists. Everything said. against the dramatist was regarded by him as a proof of his importance. When the public papers censured the manage- ment of his theatre, and his fellow-managers wished that a reply should be made to their objections, Cibber considered that the best policy was to say nothing ; and "my reason for it was," he observes, "that I knew of but one way to silence authors of that stamp, which was to grow insignificant and. good for nothing, and then we should hear no more of them."

Apparently, he was not quite so impervious to the stings left by Pope's verses, and ultimately made the poet wince under an attack that illustrates very forcibly the grossness of the age. But for a long time Cibber bore Pope's malice unmoved.

"When I find my name," he wrote, "in the satirical works of our most celebrated living .author, I never look upon those lines as malice meant to me, for he knows I never provoked. it, but profit to himself. One of his points must be to have

many readers. He considers that my face and name are more known than those of many thousands of more consequence in the Kingdom ; that, therefore, right or wrong, a lick at the Laureate will always be a sure bait, ad captandurn vulgus, to catch him little readers." Pope, with his extreme sensitive- ness and irritable disposition, was scarcely a match, despite his genius, for an enemy so thick-skinned and. with a temper so imperturbable. Indeed, he did far less harm to the Laureate than to the Duneicul, which lost much of its point when Theobald was dethroned.

The Apology is one of the most attractive books of its class, and is remarkable for the careless ease with which it is written. No dullard could have composed a work which is said to have kept Swift up all night, which Horace Walpole thought worthy of immortality, and Dr. Johnson found "very entertaining." Cibber's passion for the theatre began early, and he thought himself the happiest of mortals when, after a long probation, during which he bad the "joy and privilege" of seeing plays and giving his services for nothing, he obtained a salary of 10s. a week. The first praise the actor received almost took his breath away and brought tears into his eyes. When his Embry was doubled and he was assured of 220 a year from his father, he took "a leap in the dark" and married. Not long afterwards, urged by necessity, he began to write for the stage. "My muse and my spouse," he said, "were equally prolific; tlie one was seldom the mother of a child but in the same year the other made me the father of a play." His first play, Love's Last Shift, in which Cibber took a part with great applause, kept possession of the stage for forty years ; and if success is a te-st of merit, he had reason to

be satisfied both as author and actor. In the course of his long life he wrote about thirty plays, and on the stage appears to have been always a favourite of the public. When Cibber was seventy, Horace Walpole writes :—" Old Cibber plays to- night, and all the world will be there." He is said in his later years to have played for 250 a night, at that time the largest sum ever received by any English actor.

The latter hslf of the seventeenth century was the most dissolute in our annals, and its dramatic literature testified to the profligacy of the town. While our playwrights borrowed freely from Moliere, they neglected to imitate the purity of that great master. It is impossible to exaggerate the gross- ness of Dryden and Wycherley, of Congreve and Mrs. Behn; and the statement of a recent critic that Cibber's plays "are praiseworthy for their comparative innocence," does but serve to illustrate the excessive grossness of the time. In the Apology, Cibber asserts that the enormities of the Stage are palpably owing to the depraved taste of the multitude. "While vice and farcical folly," he writes, "are the most profitable commodities, why should we wonder that, time out of mind, the poor comedian, when real wit would bear no price, should deal in what would bring him most ready- money ? But this, you will say, is making the Stage a nursery of vice and folly, or at least keeping an open shop for it. I grant it; but who do you expect should reform it ? The actors ? Why so ? If people are permitted to buy it without blushing, the theatrical merchant seems to have an equal right to the liberty of selling it without reproach." He affirms truly enough that the Stage, when not abused, is a delightful school of morality ; but such a school was unknown, except in theory, to Cibber and his contemporaries.

Corrupt as the theatre was, the genius of many of the actors and actresses was remarkable. Cibber, an admirable and discriminating critic, writes of them with enthusiasm. OfBetterton, who lives in the memorable eulogy of Steele, and is styled by Pepys the best actor in the world, he writes in an elaborate and masterly piece of criticism that, like Shakespeare, he had no competitor,—" the one was born alone to speak what the other only knew to write ;" and even in old age, Mrs. Betterton, the actor's wife, is said to have been the admiration of all the best judges of nature, and without a rival in Shakespeare's plays. Two of the most famous of the actresses praised by Cibber are Mrs. Barry and Mrs. Oldfield ; yet so little hope was there of the former "at her first setting out, that she was at the end of the first year discharged the company;" and Mrs. Oldfield "had been a year in the Theatre Royal before she was observed to give any tolerable hope of her being an actress, so unlike to all manner of propriety was her speaking." It was Mrs. Barry of whom Dryden wrote as having" gained a reputation beyond any woman I have ever seen on the theatre." Mrs. Oldfield, a woman of many virtues though not virtuous, suffered more than once under the lash of Pope. As an actress, she must have been equal to Mrs. Bracegirdle, "the darling of the theatre," whom, indeed, she seems to have supplanted, which may account for that actress's retirement at the early age of thirty. It will be remembered that it was not until after the Restora- tion that women appeared upon the Stage, and the sudden display of female talent is remarkable. In addition to the names already mentioned, Cibber praises Mrs. Verbruggen as "mistress of more variety of humour than I ever knew in any one woman actress ;" and Mrs. Butler as "a capital and admired performer ;" and although he does not describe poor Nell Gwyn's theatrical talent, for she died when he was a boy, we know from the warm but not indiscriminate praise of Pepys, that her abilities as a comic actress were of no common order.

Mr. Lowe has edited this fine edition of the Apology with

great care. His notes are copious—indeed, too copious, for

some of them might have been spared with advantage—but the editor has done well to illustrate his text with the Historia Histrionica, and with Aston's Brief Supplement to Cibber's Lives of the late Famous Actors and Actresses, two rare tracts, which, as Mr. Lowe justly observes, form e natural introduction to Cibber's History of the Stage and of his own career. A supple- mentary chapter to the Apology describes the chief incidents of theatrical history up to the time of the author's death, and a copious index adds to the value of an edition which will not wily please the general reader, but satisfy the student of the pealed.