Marmontel has recorded the performances at the house of M. de la Popliniere, the rich financier at Passy; but the most superb of the dramatic fêtes of that day, were those of Mademoiselle Guimard, the celebrated opera-dancer, who united the most cultivated taste and genuine philanthropy, with the most shameful libertinism. No woman attracted the attention of all classes so much as this celebrated courtezan, and artiste. Her palace, her boudoir, her equipages, her servants, amazed Paris by their sumptuousness. As she passed through the streets in her carriage, with her well-known arms encircled in an escutcheon, from the middle of which issued a branch of myrtle, supported by the Graces, and crowned by Venus, all passers-by gazed on her with delight. She gave weekly, three suppers, in which she indulged her various taste for ostentation, belle lettres, and gaiety. The first was composed of the nobility; at the second were assembled authors, artists, and litterati, who paid homage to her genius; and the third was of a character which decency does not permit us to describe. When Mademoiselle Guimard retired from the stage, where she had long reigned without a rival, she equalled the ostentatious magnificence of those Greek courtezans, who built pyramids, or founded public games; she erected two private theatres, one of the most superb description, at Pantin. Here she invited her friends, and attracted to her stage the dramatic Coryphae of the public theatres; and for her performances, Marmontel wrote some of his "Proverbes Dramatiques." So popular were these enchanting entertainments, that the authorities were obliged to restrain the actors from attending them, as they did so to the neglect of their public functions. Our space permits only to refer to the private theatre of M. Trudaine, on the boards of which "Les Accidents ou les Abbés," a piece considered by Collé, its author, too licentious to be printed with his other works, was yet thought innocent enough to be acted in the presence of two Popish bishops.

The fate of the martyred queen, Marie Antoinette, has cast a melancholy gloom over the retrospection of the festivities of Marly and the little Trianon, where the amusements of the court were to parody the sittings of the parliament of Paris, in a sort of mockheroic pantomime; one of the Princes playing the part of the president, and the beau Dillon, Besenvald, Segur, and others, representing ludicrously the other personages. In one of these merry audiences, the role of Procureur - général was sustained by a youth who little foresaw the destiny that awaited him,-La Fayette, under the auspices of the then happy Queen. The Count d'Artois (Charles X.) became a skilful rope-dancer, to qualify himself to take part in the ballets which succeeded these pantomimes. Tired of “jeux de société," these royal playfellows aspired to regular acting, and the Queen relieved herself from the representation of royalty, by acting soubrettes in the "Gaguere Imprévue" and the "Devin du Village." She devoted her mornings to the study of her characters, and took lessons from Micku, of the Comédie Italienne. This favourite passion was opposed by the unhappy Louis and his brother, who would not suffer Madame to act; the King is said to have hissed the royal débutante the first night; but she received the rebuff with good humour, laughed, and played the next evening. One evening she ordered the gardes du corps to be present at the exhibition. When

the comedy was finished, the royal actress came forward, and solicited their voices by saying, "Messieurs, j'ai fait ce que j'ai pu, pour vous amuser j'aurois voulu mieux jouer afin de vous donner plus de plaisir !" And yet the gay and innocent Queen was an indifferent actress. In Italy and France, the cultivation of the histrionic art among amateurs prevailed long before the establishment of public actors; but in England, mercenary stage-players existed from a very early period. It was not until the reign of James I. that private theatricals made any progress, and the court and nobility took part in masques-those rich and fanciful spectacles, on which the Veres, the Derbys, the Bedfords, the Cliffords, the Arundels, and other historical names reflect such lustre, and which have been enshrined imperishably in our literature, by the pens of Jonson and Milton. The imaginations of the writers who describe those splendid scenes appear to bend under the weight of the pomp and prodigality displayed, as though they thought,

"That to narrate the whole, would be, in sooth,

To give mute wonder wing, and wed romance to truth."

The court of James's queen, Anne of Denmark, derives its principal and peculiar celebrity, from the performance of Jonson's masques. For the Twelfth Night of 1605, his "Masque of Blackness" was produced, with a magnificence, that can be faintly imaged to us by the knowledge of its cost, 30007. It was represented in the banqueting room at Whitehall, the chief parts being sustained by the Queen, Lucy Countess of Bedford, that "crowning rose" in the garland of English beauty, which the Spanish ambassador desired Madame Beaumont to bring with her to an entertainment in 1603, and ten other ladies of the court, who personated the parts of Moors, and had, as we are informed by Sir Dudley Carleton, "their faces and arms up to their elbows painted black. But it became them," he adds, "nothing so well as their own red and white."

The "Masque of Hymen," the "Masque of Beauty," regarding which Jonson writes, "that the throne whereon the actors sat seemed to be a mine of light, struck from their jewels and their garments;" the "Masque of Queens," the "Antemasque of Witches," with many others, all followed in glorious succession, nor were any suffered to be contaminated by plebeian performers. In the "Masque of Oberon," Sir John Finnet tells us, "the little Duke Charles (Charles I.) was found to be in the midst of the fairy dancers." The "Hue and Cry after Cupid," as performed at Lord Harrington's marriage, 1608, cost the eleven noblemen and gentlemen concerned in it, "3007. a man."

The troubles of the government, and the personal anxieties of Charles I., banished, in a great degree, theatrical amusements from the court during his reign, but they took refuge in the scarcely less sumptuous households of the nobility. The performance of two masques of that day will carry down to immortality the memory of those who assisted in them, we allude to the Arcades and Comus of Milton. The former was performed by the children of the Countess Dowager of Derby, at her seat, Harefield Place; and the latter, says Jonson, "was presented at Ludlow, then the residence of the Lord President of Wales, in 1634, and had the honour of being acted by the Earl of Bridgewater's sons and daughters."

The last attempt made to revive this species of entertainment was in the reign of Charles II., when the two future Queens, Mary and Anne, assisted by many of the nobility of both sexes; among them, says Evelyn, "my dear friend, Mrs. Bragg," performed at court a masque, called" Calisto," written by Crowne, and the unfortunate Duke of Monmouth appeared among the dancers.

From the time of Charles II. till the middle of the last century, the Théâtre de Société of England affords little that is interesting. Mas querades were introduced about the same time as the House of Bruns wick, and were exceedingly popular in fashionable life during the reigns of the two first Georges. They were a favourite amusement with George II., who used frequently to mingle in the throng (sometimes exceeding in number 2000 persons) of the subscription masquerades at Ranelagh and the Opera-house. It was at an amusement of this sort, that the King, disguised in an old English habit, was delighted by a party insisting that he should wait upon them at their

tea-table.

Lady Dalkeith, daughter of the great Duke of Argyle, was one of the revivers of English private theatricals. In 1748 she collected around her a company of Scotch nobility and formed a theatre; she commenced her theatrical campaign by performing the "Revenge," which attracted the visits of the Prince and Princess of Wales. Wal pole says, "that the acting was not excellent." The same agreeable and piquant writer, under the date of 1751, records the adjournment of the House of Commons to enable the national legislators to attend at Drury-Lane, where Othello was acted by a Mr. Delaval and his family, who had hired the theatre on purpose. The crowd of people of fashion was so great, that the footmen's gallery was decorated with blue ribands

to receive them.

When the Prince and Princess of Wales were excluded from the court of their father, it became fashionable among the nobility, then in opposition, to give splendid entertainments for their amusement. For this purpose, the Duchess of Queensberry got up private theatricals, which are memorable for having enabled the favourite of those royal personages, Lord Bute, to display his finely-shaped legs, of which he was not a little proud, in the gay character of Lothario. The theatricals at Winterslow are the next that attract attention, where no less an actor on the stage of life, than Charles James Fox, played Horatio in the "Fair Penitent," and Sir Harry, in "High Life below Stairs." At Holland House, too, Mr. Fox played Hastings, to the Jane Shore of the beautiful Lady Sarah Bunbury.

Richmond House presents another patrician theatre of bygone times, the attractions of which, on one occasion, shortened the solemn sittings of the House of Commons, and brought Mr. Pitt himself" under the wand of the enchanters." That festive evening had the glory of having collected Fox, Pitt, and Sheridan, in one hackney-coach to be conveyed to the gay scene.

About the same time that a taste for private theatricals reappeared in England, a similar feeling manifested itself among the higher ranks in Ireland. In the year 1759, a series of amusements of this sort were given at Lurgan, in the county of Armagh, the seat of that distinguished member of the Irish parliament, William Brownlow. To this

meeting, the stage is indebted for the popular entertainment of "Midas," in the performance of which, the part of Pan was sustained by its author, Mr. Kane O'Hara. To these representations succeeded in the following year, a sort of theatrical jubilee, at Castletown, the seat of the Right Hon. Thomas Conolly, where after the performance of the first part of Henry IV., an epilogue was spoken by Hussey Burgh, one of the most accomplished men the bar of Ireland ever produced. Ireland's only duke, Leinster, too, about the same time, opened his princely mansion at Cartown, to a series of dramatic entertainments, when the performance of Lockit, in the "Beggar's Opera," by the very Rev. Dean Marly, did not prejudice that excellent person's advancement to the mitre of Waterford.

Among the most interesting of Irish private theatricals of the last century, were those got up in 1774, at the seats of Sir Hercules Langrishe and Mr. Flood, where the two celebrated orators Grattan and Flood appeared together on the stage; and, in personating the two contending chieftains, Macbeth and Macduff, had a sort of poetical rehearsal of their own future political rivalry. The name of Grattan is again connected with private theatricals in 1776, when, after a representation of the "Masque of Comus," at the country-seat of David Latouche, an epilogue from his pen was spoken-the only copy of verses he is known to have written. In 1785 a private theatre was established at Slanes Castle, in the list of the actors of which there occurs the name of Lord Edward Fitzgerald. In 1802 the late Mr.

Richard Power, "a man who never made an enemy or lost a friend," as the able and eloquent Chief-justice Bushe well said of him, founded a private theatrical society at Kilkenny, where performances were continued annually, with but few interruptions, until 1819, and which ranked among its members, Mr. Grattan, Mr. Curran, Mr. Thomas Moore, Mr. Corry, &c. &c. With the theatrical society of Kilkenny expired the last remains of what may be termed the Social Era in Ireland.

H. H.

THE GREAT DOINGS OF DR. DOOLITTLE.

If the busy land of cultivation has converted the bold and diversified features of our country into one uniform and tame, if not spiritless surface; so, in like manner, has civilization worked a corresponding change in its inhabitants; for intellectual improvement, and extensive intercourse have so assimilated the habits of men, that individual peculiarities are no longer prominent. The novelist, therefore, who sports in search of native simplicity and eccentricity of character, will often return after many a weary search, without bagging a single bird of rare or unknown feather. There may, however, occasionally be found a genuine and unsophisticated specimen of humanity, even as we may observe a rocky eminence still bidding defiance to the plough which has brought under its dominion the extended plain that smiles around itand now for our story.

In a remote and sequestered village in the west of England, in which the only news-room was the barber's shop, and the only newspaper a weekly chronicle received three days after date, lived Timothy Doolittle, the renowned Galen of the district, and whose name rejoicing in the orthodox appendages of "surgeon, apothecary, and man-midwife," served as a constant memento of the two great cardinal ills of life,-declining health, and increasing population. He was about fifty-six years of age, and although very nearly six feet in height, was as erect as a drill-sergeant; and being one of those orthodox persons who resisted every species of innovation, he had never altered his dress, a pepper-and-salt suit, since the days of his youth, regarding a change of costume as wanton as a change in the pharmacopoeia. Upon the same principle, did he daily submit to the routine operation of the village barber, so that the colour of his hair must remain as an unsolved problem, concealed as it ever was by a profusion of powder, and drawn behind into a queue of considerable magnitude; for the supply of which, it would appear that a barbarous species of conscription had been in operation, since every hair apparent was dragged from its native spot to give weight and importance to this favoured appendage of his capitol. Beneath this mass of Polar snow, blazed a ruddy countenance animated by an expression which at once announced that internal satisfaction which self-approbation can alone bestow. In short, our friend Doolittle ought to have been the happiest of mortals, for never had a doctor been on better terms with himself, or on better footing with his patients. He chuckled over a black dose, as he mingled its motley ingredients-with as much glee as the great Ude must have felt over his daintiest invention while his patients swallowed the healing composition with complacency and satisfaction, if not with gastronomic avidity. In a word, his elixirs were the very type of that attribute which has ever distinguished the physician-mercy. Pleasing alike to him that gives, and him that takes.

Timothy Doolittle ought surely to have been the happiest and most contented of mortals-but, alas! there still remained a vacant corner in his breast. He sighed for a doctor's diploma-could that once be obtained, the measure of his earthly felicity, as he thought, would be full to the very brim. The fire that has been secretly smouldering for years may burst forth into a flame by an accidental puff of wind. A vacancy having occurred in the office of parochial surgeon in a neighbouring village, Dr. Doolittle became a candidate, but was defeated, in consequence, as it was generally rumoured, of his rival having long had a diploma "in his pocket," although hitherto he had never availed himself of its advantages. No sooner did this information reach the ears of our unlucky friend, than he applied without delay to his neighbour, Mr. Andrew Grumditch, a retired schoolmaster, whose wife had influential relatives in Scotland, and through whose interest he hoped he might obtain the object of his lofty ambition. He was not deceived; the diploma arrived in due course, duly signed and sealed, in a bright tincase, conferring upon the aforesaid Timothy Doolittle, the title, dignity, and all the honours, privileges, and immunities, and so forth, which appertain to a medical graduate of the first rank. have stated that the diploma arrived in a tincase, a circumstance which the reader may perchance regard as trivial and unimportant, but