PLURALISM.
THE stars of the May and June Meetings certainly do contrive to do a large stroke of business during their stay in the Metropolis. " One man in his time plays many parts." The orator who one day lashes his audience into a storm of indignation against Slave- owners, tunes his pipe next day to the dulcet notes of the Peace Convention ; on the third he may be heard advocating the cause of Missions, and on the fourth seen figuring at a Complete Suffrage Meeting.
To what are those multiform appearances attributable ? They may be owing to sheer consciousness of versatile talent in
the performer. Like WHARTON, of whom it was said,
"Though wondering Senates hang on all he spoke, The club must hail him master at ajoke: "
or like GARRICK, who would shine in Othello and Abel Dragger on the same night; or KEAN, who enacted Richard the Third, Paul, and Harlequin, for his benefit ; our provincial orators may be anxious to give the London audiences a taste of all their qualities while they have an opportunity. They may wish to take time by the fore-lock, and prevent people going away with the impression that they can only do one thing well. They may resemble bully Bottom, who with his good-will would have enacted every character in the lamentable tragedy of "Pyramus and Thisbe" himself. Or it may be that the paucity of performers obliges the managers of the meetings, in stage phrase, to "double" the parts. The same cause often obliged Gitutt.uni to Clown it in the early part of the evening at Saddler's Wells and at a later hour in Covent Garden. It may be that the stage-managers of the Complete Suffrage say to the managers of the Peace Convention, "Lend us your Yankee., and you shall have our Quaker"; or the managers of the Foreign and Colonial Missionary to the managers of the Anti-Slavery, "Lend us your Negro, and you shall have our Indian" ; or the managers of the Peace Convention to the managers of the Anti-Slavery, "Lend us your Yankee Negro preacher' and you shall have one Scotch, two Irish, and as many English Dis- senting ministers as you please."
Or, lastly, it may be that those societies, Peace Anti-Slavery, Complete Suffrage, Dissenting, and Low-Church Missionary, are only so many different designations for the same person. The attender of meetings, who, attracted by all this variety of names, finds, to his disappointment, the same placid features, decent black or drab clothes, smooth cropped hair, provincial accents, nay, the same sentiments, dished up under each different designation, must feel very much like the traveller in Germany of whom there is a current Joe Miller. Having been fleeced by the landlord of the inn, be went to complain to the local judge : after he had waited some time, in stalked the landlord himself, in judicial cos- tume, and decided in his own case against the complainant ; the same original landlord afterwards enforced the sentence of the judge, in his capacity of constable ; and when the despairing traveller, anxious to quit the scence of his discomfiture, ordered a post-chaise, he was driven away by his old adversary in the cha- racter of postilion.
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