[Illustration: The Great "American Tragedian."]
And in Macbeth, King Duncan, after being carved up by his treacherous kinsman with two white handled butcher-knives, returns as Hecate in the witch scenes, and afterwards as court physician to Lady M., besides which he generally blows the flourishes on the trumpet for the entrances of the King, beats the bass drum, and attends to the sheet-iron thunder.
I have always had a passion for theatricals, and was at one time of my variegated existence much more intimately connected with the stage than at present--and on reaching this city I felt, of course, a great desire to behold again the theatre, with all its brilliant fascinations--the light, the music, the varied scenery comprising gardens, chambers, cottages, mountains, "cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces," bar-rooms, churches, huts and hovels--to look again upon the glass jewels, the tinselled robes of mimic royalty, the pasteboard banquets and molasses wine, and all the glory, "pride, pomp and circumstance" and humbug which I once "knew so well," "_et quorum magna pars fui_."
So, with my trusty friends, Damphool and Bull Dogge, I wended my way to the Metropolitan Theatre No. 1, to see and hear the distinguished Mr. Rantanrave Hellitisplit, the notorious American tragedian, in his great, original, unapproachable, inconceivable, inexplicable, incomprehensible part of "What a bore O, the last of the Vollypogs."
I had heard so much of this great actor in this particular part, that I expected to behold nothing less than the "Eighth wonder of the world."
Opera glasses were continually levelled at us by people who, impelled by a laudable curiosity, were anxious to see all that could _be_ seen. (Damphool says, that when you see a _woman_ with one of these implements, you may be sure she wants to be looked at--and called my attention to the confirmatory fact, that all the ladies with the finest busts, and the best developed forms, wore their dresses the lowest in the neck, and sported the biggest opera glasses). (Bull Dogge asserts that they were invented by the author of "Staring made Easy," and "A Treatise on the Use of Globes.")
After a season of tramping by the intelligent audience, which seemed, by its measured regularity, to intimate that they had learned the motion in the treadmill, the bell jingled and the members of the orchestra entered, one by one.