There is a line of character in which Mr. Charles
Mathews is without a rival; and it is a line which it would be impossible to render comprehen- sible to a person unacquainted with theatres. For the fashionable rakes, who are the heroes of old comedy, ho wants stamina; for those impudent and not very highbred adventurers who were so long the despots of farce, and in the delineation of whom poor Wrench used to display real richness of assurance, his style is altogether too light: the cool impudence that can swagger through a scrape, and look calmly at every unexpected diffi- culty with the moral certainty of being able to trump it with a lie, re- quires an aplomb that is not in the nature of Mr. Charles Mathews. But let him have a character in which the great feature is volubility of speech and activity of bodily movement, and no one can approach him. The ad- venturers in delineating whom he is most successful are of quite a different herd from those personated by Wrench. It is not by their coolness but by their quickness that they work their way: they pelt their victim with a quantity of syllables, and distract his attention by a thousand fidgetty tricks.- An- Italian buffo could alone equal Charles Mathews in the number of words uttered in a given number of minutes; and he is perfectly inimitable in performing about a room all those feats which seem to spring from a rest- less temperament, and which embitter the existence of the nervous man. No one should judge of Charles Mathews from the way he acts in a quiet part. When there is no room for rapidity, he is weak; volubility, and not strength, being his characteristic. This be well knows; and all those pieces which he has written or adapted for his peculiar repertoire exactly show an appretiation of his own talent. A new extravaganza produced at the Princess's, under the title of A Sovereign Remedy, may be added to his list. Here he acts a quack-doctor, who boasts that he can cure mental evils by a certain compound; spreads scandalous rumours, to produce such moral maladies as he professes to heal; and then tempts everybody to sniff his bottle, which plunges them into ridiculous lethargies. The plot is no- thing, but the dialogue is comical; and Mr. Mathews is quite in his element.
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