NOT many nights ago I had e home from seeing this extraordinary performer in Cockletop; and when I retired to my pillow, his whimsical image still stuck by me, in a manner as to threaten sleep. In vain I tried to divest myself of it, by juring up the most opposite associations. I resolved to be serious. I raised up the gravest topics of life; private misery, public calamity. All would not do.
--------There the antic sate
Mog our state -
his queer visnomy -- his bewildering e -- all the strahings which he had raked together -- his serpentine rod, swagging about in his pocket -- Cleopatras tear, and the rest of his relics -- OKeefes wild farce, and his wilder entary -- till the passion of laughter, like grief in excess, relieved itself by its ow, inviting the sleep whi the first insta had driven away.
But I was not to escape so easily. No sooner did I fall into slumbers, than the same image, only more perplexing, assailed me in the shape of dreams. Not one Munden, but five hundred, were dang before me, like the faces which, whether you will or no, e when you have been taking opium -- all the strange binations, which this stra of all strange mortals ever shot his proper teo, from the day he came issioo dry up the tears of the town for the loss of the now almost fotten Edwin. O for the power of the pencil to have fixed them when I awoke! A season or two sihere was exhibited a Hallery. I do not see why there should not be a Munden gallery. In riess and variety the latter would not fall far short of the former.
There is one face of Farley, one face of Knight, one (but what a o is!) of Liston; but Munden has hat you properly pin down, and call his. When you think he has exhausted his battery of looks, in unatable warfare with yravity, suddenly he sprouts out airely new set of features, like Hydra. He is not one, but legion. Not so much a edian, as a pany. If his name could be multiplied like his te might fill a play-bill. He, and he alone, literally makes faces: applied to any other person, the phrase is a mere figure, denotiain modifications of the human tenance. Out of some invisible wardrobe he dips for faces, as his friend Suett used fs, aches them out as easily. I should not be surprised to see him some day put out the head of a river horse; or e forth a pewitt, or lapwing, some feathered metamorphosis.
I have seen this gifted actor in Sir Christopher Curry -- in Old Dornton -- diffuse a glow of se which has made the pulse of a crowded theatre beat like that of one man; when he has e in aid of the pulpit, doing good to the moral heart of a people. I have seen some faint approaches to this sort of excellen other players. But in the grand grotesque of farce, Muands out as single and unapanied as Hogarth. Hogarth, strao tell, had no followers. The school of Munden began, and must end with himself.
any man wonder, like him? any man see ghosts, like him? ht with his own shadow -- " sessa " -- as he does in that strangely-ed thing, the Cobbler of Preston -- where his alternations from the Cobbler to the Magnifico, and from the Magnifico to the Cobbler, keep the brain of the spectator in as wild a ferment, as if some Arabian Night were being acted before him. Who like him throw, or ever attempted to throreternatural i over the o daily-life objects? A table, or a joint stool, in his ception, rises into a dignity equivalent to Cassiopeias chair. It is ied with stellatory importance. You could not sp