Poorly mounted, feebly played,--save in one
particular,--they drew but thin houses. Gradually, however, you began to
hear at clubs and in critical coteries--at the Albion and the Garrick
and the Cafe de l'Europe, at Evans's and at Kilpack's, at the Reunion in
Maiden Lane and at Rules's oyster-room, where poor Albert Smith used to
reign supreme--rumors about a new actor. The new man was playing
_Macbeth_ and _Shylock_ in Talfourd and Hale's parodies. He was a little
stunted fellow, not very well-favored, not very young. Nobody--among the
bodies who were anybody--had ever heard of him before. Whence he came,
or what he was, none knew; but everybody came at last to care. For this
little stunted creature, with his hoarse voice and nervous gestures and
grotesque delivery, his snarls, his leers, his hunchings of the
shoulders, his contortions of the limbs, his gleaming of the eyes, and
his grindings of the teeth, was a genius. He became town-talk. He
speedily grew famous. He has been an English, I might almost say a
European, I might almost say a worldwide celebrity ever since; and his
name was FREDERICK ROBSON.
Eventually it was known, when the town grew inquisitive, and the critics
were compelled to ferret out his antecedents, that the new actor had
already attained middle age,--that he had been vegetating for years in
that obscurest and most miserable of all dramatic positions, the low
comedian of a country-theatre,--that he had come timidly to London and
accepted at a low salary the post of buffoon at a half-theatre
half-saloon in the City Road, called indifferently the "Grecian" and the
"Eagle," where he had danced and tumbled, and sung comic songs, and
delivered the dismal waggeries set down for him, without any marked
success, and almost without notice.
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