"Vilikins and his Dinah" created a _furore_. My countrymen are always
going mad about something; and Englishmen and Englishwomen all agreed to
go crazy about "Vilikins." "Right tooral lol looral" was on every lip.
Robson's portrait as _Jem Baggs_ was in every shop-window. A newspaper
began an editorial with the first line in "Vilikins,"--
"It's of a liquor-merchant who in London did dwell."
A Judge of Assize absolutely fined the High Sheriff of a county one
hundred pounds for the mingled contempt shown in neglecting to provide
him with an escort of javelin-men and introducing the irrepressible
"Right tooral lol looral" into a speech delivered at the opening of
circuit. Nor was the song all that was wonderful in _Jem Baggs_. His
"make-up" was superb. The comic genius of Robson asserted itself in an
inimitable lagging gait, an unequalled snivel, a coat and pantaloons
every patch on and every rent in which were artistic, and a hat
inconceivably battered, crunched, and bulged out of normal, and into
preternatural shape.
New triumphs awaited him. In the burlesque of "The Yellow Dwarf," he
showed a mastery of the grotesque which approached the terrible. Years
before, in _Macbeth_, he had personated a red-headed, fire-eating,
whiskey-drinking Scotchman,--and in _Shylock_, a servile, fawning,
obsequious, yet, when emergency arose, a passionate and vindictive Jew.
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