The Collected Works of Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb. Charles Lamb

      I.—MRS. GOULD (MISS BURRELL) IN "DON GIOVANNI IN LONDON"

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      Olympic Theatre

      (1818)

This Theatre, fitted up with new and tasteful decorations, opened on Monday with a burletta founded upon a pleasant extravagance recorded of Wilmot the "mad Lord" of Rochester. The house, in its renovated condition, is just what play-houses should be, and once were, from its size admirably adapted for seeing and hearing, and only perhaps rather too well lit up. Light is a good thing, but to preserve the eyes is still better. Elliston and Mrs. Edwin personated a reigning wit and beauty of the Court of Charles the Second to the life. But the charm of the evening to us, we confess, was the acting of Mrs. T. Gould (late Miss Burrell) in the burlesque Don Giovanni which followed. This admirable piece of foolery takes up our hero just where the legitimate drama leaves him, on the "burning marl." We are presented with a fair map of Tartarus, the triple-headed cur, the Furies, the Tormentors, and the Don, prostrate, thunder-smitten. But there is an elasticity in the original make of this strange man, as Richardson would have called him. He is not one of those who change with the change of climate. He brings with him to his new habitation ardours as glowing and constant as any which he finds there. No sooner is he recovered from his first surprise, than he falls to his old trade, is caught "ogling Proserpine," and coquets with two she devils at once, till he makes the house too hot to hold him; and Pluto (in whom a wise jealousy seems to produce the effects of kindness) turns him neck and heels out of his dominions—much to the satisfaction of Giovanni, who stealing a boat from Charon, and a pair of light heels from Mercury, or (as he familiarly terms him) Murky, sets off with flying colours, conveying to the world above the souls of three damsels, just eloped from Styx, to comfort his tender and new-born spiritualities on the journey. Arrived upon earth (with a new body, we are to suppose, but his old habits) he lights a-propos upon a tavern in London, at the door of which three merry weavers, widowers, are trouling a catch in triumph over their deceased spouses—

      They lie in yonder church-yard

       At rest—and so are we.

      Their departed partners prove to be the identical lady ghosts who have accompanied the Don in his flight, whom he now delivers up in perfect health and good plight, not a jot the worse for their journey, to the infinite surprise, and consternation ill-dissembled, of their ill-fated, twice-yoked mates. The gallantries of the Don in his second state of probation, his meeting with Leporello, with Donna Anna, and a countless host of injured virgins besides, doing penance in the humble occupation of apple-women, fishwives and sausage-fryers, in the purlieus of Billinsgate and Covent-garden, down to the period of his complete reformation, and being made an honest man of, by marrying into a sober English citizen's family, although infinitely pleasant in the exhibition, would be somewhat tedious in the recital: but something must be said of his representative.

We have seen Mrs. Jordan in male characters, and more ladies beside than we would wish to recollect—but never any that so completely answered the purpose for which they were so transmuted, as the Lady who enacts the mock Giovanni. This part, as it is played at the Great House in the Haymarket (Shade of Mozart, and ye living admirers of Ambrogetti, pardon the barbarity) had always something repulsive and distasteful to us.—We cannot sympathize with Leporello's brutal display of the list, and were shocked (no strait-laced moralists either) with the applauses, with the endurance we ought rather to say, which fashion and beauty bestowed upon that disgustful insult to feminine unhappiness. The Leporello of the Olympic Theatre is not one of the most refined order, but we can bear with an English blackguard better than with the hard Italian. But Giovanni—free, fine, frank-spirited, single-hearted creature, turning all the mischief into fun as harmless as toys, or children's make-believe, what praise can we repay to you, adequate to the pleasure which you have given us? We had better be silent, for you have no name, and our mention will but be thought fantastical. You have taken out the sting from the evil thing, by what magic we know not, for there are actresses of greater mark and attribute than you. With you and your Giovanni our spirits will hold communion, whenever sorrow or suffering shall be our lot. We have seen you triumph over the infernal powers; and pain, and Erebus, and the powers of darkness, are henceforth "shapes of a dream."

II.—MISS KELLY AT BATH

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      (1819)

Dear G.——I was thinking yesterday of our old play-going days, of your and my partiality to Mrs. Jordan; of our disputes as to the relative merits of Dodd and Parsons; and whether Smith or Jack Palmer, were the most of a Gentleman. The occasion of my falling into this train of thinking was my learning from the newspapers that Miss Kelly is paying the Bath Theatre a visit. (Your own Theatre, I am sorry to find, is shut up, either from parsimonious feelings, or through the influence of—— principles.[36]) This lady has long ranked among the most considerable of our London performers. If there are one or two of greater name, I must impute it to the circumstance, that she has never burst upon the town at once in the maturity of her power; which is a great advantage to debutantes, who have passed their probationary years in Provincial Theatres. We do not hear them tuning their instruments. But she has been winning her patient way from the humblest gradations to the eminence which she has now attained, on the self same boards which supported her

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