THE casual sight of an old Play Bill, which I picked up the other day -- I know not by what ce it reserved so long -- tempts me to call to mind a few of the Players, who make the principal figure in it. It presents the cast of parts iwelfth Night, at the old Drury-laheatre two-and-thirty years ago. There is somethioug in these old remembrahey make us think how we once used to read a Play Bill -- not, as now peradventure, singling out a favorite performer, and casting a negligent eye over the rest; but spelling out every name, down to the very mutes and servants of the se when it was a matter of no small moment to us whether Whitfield, or Packer, took the part of Fabian; when Benson, and Burton, and Phillimore -- names of small at -- had an importance, beyond what we be tent to attribute now to the times best actors.-" Orsino, by Mr. Barrymore. "What a full Shakspearian sound it carries! how fresh to memory arise the image, and the manner, of the geor!
Those who have only seen Mrs. Jordan within the last ten or fifteen years, have no adequate notion of her performance of such parts as Ophelia; Helena, in Alls Well that Ends Well; and Viola in this play. Her voice had latterly acquired a coarseness, which suited well enough with her Nells and Hoydens, but in those days it sank, with her steady melting eye, into the heart. Her joyous parts -- in which her memory now chiefly lives -- in her youth were outdone by her plaintive ohere is no giving an at how she delivered the disguised story of her love for Orsino. It was speech, that she had foreseen, so as to weave it into an harmonious period, line necessarily following lio make up the music -- yet I have heard it so spoken, or rather read, not without its grad beauty -- but, when she had declared her sisters history to be a "blank," and that she "old her love," there ause, as if the story had ended -- and then the image of the "worm in the bud" came up as a new suggestion -- and the heightened image of Patieill followed after that, as by some growing (and not meical) process, thought springing up after thought, I would almost say, as they were watered by her tears. So in those fine lines -
Write loyal tos of ned love --
Hollow your o the reverberate hills -
there was no preparation made in the foing image for that which was to follow. She used no rhetori her passion or it was natures oworic, most legitimate then, when it seemed altogether without rule or law.
Mrs. Powel (now Mrs. Renard), then in the pride of her beauty, made an admirable Olivia. She articularly excellent in her unbending ses in versation with the . I have seen some Olivias -- and those very sensible actresses too -- who in these interlocutions have seemed to set their wits at the jester, and to vie ceits with him in dht emulation. But she used him for her sport, like what he was, to trifle a leisure sentence or two with, and then to be dismissed, and she to be the Great Lady still. She touched the imperious fantastic humour of the character with y. Her fine spacious person filled the se.
The part of Malvolio has in my judgment been so often misuood, and the general merits of the actor, who then played it, so unduly appreciated, that I shall hope for pardon, if I am a little prolix upon these points.
Of all the actors who flourished in my time -- a melancholy phrase if taken aright, reader -- Bensley had most of the swell of soul, was greatest in the delivery of heroiceptions