A Lick at the Laureate

The Life and Times of Colley Cibber. By Dorothy Senior, (Constable. 18s.) COLLEY CIBBER was fair game for any satirist. There have

been worse Poet Laureates than he, perhaps ; but none that offered so easy a target. His vanity was prodigious : he thrived on ridicule. All the squibs that were written about him were collected by his friends and sent off to him. He even wrote epigrams against himself and circulated them anonymously. It was better to be known as a fool and a coxcomb, he felt, than not to be known at all.

In his schooldays he showed already the characteristics of the man. He was talented, in a scapegrace kind of way.

" A giddy negligence always possessed me, and so much, that I remember I was once soundly whipped for my theme, though my Master told me, at the same time, what was good of it was better than any boy's in the form."

It was just the kind of incident that Cibber would remember ; the sort of thing, too, that he continually recommended to the notice of his schoolmates. They found him an insufferable little prig. He was satirical at their expense ; he made up to the master ; and he gave himself such airsthat none of them could stand it.

Once he was set upon by a bigger boy ; and a schoolfellow he had thought to be a friend of his danced round for joy, shouting, " Beat him ! Beat him ! " Young Colley was hurt by this treachery, and asked him afterwards why he had done it. " Because you are always jeering at me," he answered. On the coronation of James II. the boys asked for a holiday, and the request was granted on condition that one of them wrote an Ode to the occasion. Cibber jumped at the chance, scribbled off his Ode in half an hour, and then pointed out so often and so long what a service he had done them that they left him out of their plans for the day. They were jealous, Cibber records.

He was irresistibly good-natured with people from whom he expected favours ; he was bad-tempered and tyrannical with his inferiors. " I have been assured," wrote one of his antagonists, " no person who ever had power on the stage was ever so universally odious to the actors as yourself." He was put into a gloom if another actor won praise, and, when he was acting himself, there was room for no one else. At Drury Lane, in a little room behind the stage called the Settle, the actors used to retire between acts, to gossip and joke together. Cibber seldom entered the Settle ; he knew that no one would welcome him, and, said Davies, "tyrants fear, as they know they are feared."

It was no wonder that with such a father, whose outbursts of anger sometimes put them in fear of their lives, his children should turn out badly. At four years of age his daughter Charlotte, anxious to arrogate the privileges of this despot, dressed up in his clothes and paraded before the rustics, confident that they would mistake her for a man.

In later years she took men's parts on the stage, and, this not satisfying her, on the death of her second husband, took to wearing men's clothes altogether. In this character she remained for the rest of her life, making a miserable living by hack-writing. Theophilus, his son, was a goodish actor in a violent grimacing way, but a thoroughly objectionable young man whom everyone detested.

Cibber had one quality which befriended him through all his eighty-four years ; he was irrepressibly buoyant. He did not mind, he said, being taken for a fool, so long as no one took him for " an uncheerful one." In his early struggles as

an actor he needed all his courage. Rich, the manager of Drury Lane Theatre, was one of the meanest men alive : never paid his company if he could avoid it, and kept them so short of money that they had often not a shirt to their backs. Cibber's vanity stood in the way of his getting many chances ; he made his fellow-actors jealous and angry, and asked to be overlooked. Moreover, it seemed

that he was hopeless material to make a stage idol from.

" In his early days," we read, " he was so lean as to be

known as Hatchet Face." His body was not graceful of well formed, and his voice was thin and high. As usual, how- ever, he turned his disabilities to his own advantage. He excelled particularly in foppish roles ; for there he could strut to his heart's content, and his voice, with an affected

manner of speech, fitted the part perfectly. At times he would see himself as a tragedian and play to the universal discomfort of his hearers. He was hissed off the stage as Iago, and as Richard III. he struck the audience silent by his elegant pronunciation of the line : " A harse, a harse ; my kingdom for a harse 1 "

Miss Dorothy Senior tells Cibber's life in a pleasant and lively fashion. She makes out a good case for his intelligence. The plays he wrote were among the best of his time ; for he wrote in a clear, quick-running English, with an admirable command of technique. His Autobiography, that classic of egoism, good-humour, and buffoonery, kept Swift so interested that he could not lay it down till he had finished it. His poems are too severely handled by Miss Senior : Pope's sneers have apparently damaged him beyond repair, but there have been worse poets than Cibber ; he even possessed a small stock of poetic trickery that would still pass muster.

We are not only given a life of Cibber, however : Miss Senior has also written an anecdotal history of the English Stage in the early eighteenth century. Betterton, Mrs. Siddons, Garrick, and Peg Woffmgton all come into her narrative. The publishers also deserve our thanks. The volume is nobly produced, with excellent reproductions ; it is far more pleasing to read and to handle than many expensive and ambitious