The Town Author:Leigh Hunt Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 108 MRS. JORDAN AND MR. SUETT. We will make one more quotation from this poem, because it describes a class of actors, who are now extinct, and who carried th... more »e artificial school to its height: — " Mossop, attached to military plan, Still kept his eye fixed on his right-hand man. Whilst the mouth measures words with seeming skill, The right hand labours, and the left lies still; For he resolved on scripture grounds to go, What the right doth, the left hand shall not know. With studied impropriety of speech, He soars beyond the hackney critic's reach ; To epithets allots emphatic state, Whilst principals, ungraced, like lackeys, wait; In ways first trodden by himself excels, And stands alone in indeclinables ; Conjunction, preposition, adverb join, To stamp new vigour on the nervous line : In monosyllables his thunders roll; He, She, It, and We, Ye, They, fright the soul." Mr. Barrymore (of whom we have no unpleasing recollection) had something of this manner with him ; but the extremity of the style is now quite gone out. The only capital performers we remember, that are now dead and gone, with the exception of two or three already mentioned, were Mrs. Jordan, a charming cordial actress on the homely side of the agreeable, with a delightful voice; and Suett, who was the very personification of weak whimsicality, with a laugh like a peal of giggles. Mathews gives him to the life. We shall conclude this chapter with some delightful play-going recollections of the best theatrical critic now living; — the best, indeed, as far as we know, that thiscountry ever saw. He is one who does not respect criticism a jot too much, nor any of the feelings connected with humanity, or the imitation of it, too little. We here have him giving us an account of the impression made upon h...« less