read, or whether he be Mr. Fitzball, whose
melodramas, in the plainest possible prose,
thousands and thousands of his countrymen
have been glad to go and see. A man who
can really accomplish what he has undertaken
to do is such a rarity, especially on the
English stage, that he deserves civil recognition
at the very least. We are so inveterately
comic now-a days, that we must always laugh,
even at the wrong man; and, in the mean,
time, the quack who deserves our ridicule,
too often escapes scot-free.

We find, from Fitzball's autobiography,
that his first attempt at stage composition
was made on the boards of the Norwich
Theatre. He there produced the Innkeeper
of Abbeville, which succeeded well enough
in the country to be reproduced at the Surrey
Theatre, where it ran upwards of one
hundred nights. His next attempts were Joan
of Arc and The Floating Beacon, which were
played together, nearly, if not more than four
hundred consecutive nights. To our thinking
this was not a bad beginning for a young
man. Where are the dramatists, great or
little, who begin, in that way, now?

As he gained in experience, he got on to
wider successes. His Devil's Elixir was a
great hit, even with a critical Covent-Garden
audience. His Pilot, Flying Dutchman, and
Jonathan Bradford (this last melodrama
running two hundred and sixty-four consecutive
nights) were reported to have brought
nearly twenty thousand pounds to the theatres
in which they were produced. Besides writing
these plays, he dramatised some of
Scott's and Bulwer's novels; and, later in his
career, he varied his exertions by writing the
words (or by adapting them from foreign
librettos) of some of the most popular operas
that have ever appeared on the English stage.
His poetry, taken by itself, was easy enough
to ridicule, in these cases. But who, in the
instances of other men, looks for fine poetry
in opera-books? Who wants anything of an
opera-book, but that it should be an easy and
intelligible medium for conveying music to
the public ear? If Mr. Fitzball accomplished
this object, he did enough for the purpose for
which he was employed. And, if he had
written fine verses, who, of all the listeners to
the music, would have found them out?

Excepting the cases of the operas, Mr.
Fitzball's adaptations from the French seem
to have been commendably few in number.
He took his plots from English stories, or
from romantic events recorded in the
newspapers. If a man cannot absolutely invent
for himself, it is certainly more creditable to
him as a dramatist, that he should take his
materials from widely known national sources,
than from foreign originals disguised to pass
for English, and unacknowledged on the playbills.
As no serial novels were published at
that time, he anticipated no author's stories,
and committed no graver offence than that of
attempting, generally with unmistakable
success, to present the dramatic side of a popular
novel, to an audience, for the most part, well
acquainted with it already in its original
narrative form.

We have indicated the outline of Mr.
Fitzball's dramatic career, as exhibited in his
autobiography, and we may now leave the
reader who is interested in the matter to refer
to the work itself for all details, and for a
plentiful supply of anecdotes in connection
with the actors, managers, and dramatists of
the last fifty years. It would be easy enough
to take exception to the execution of these
volumes, if it were at all desirable to do so.
But we see no necessity for trying a book
which makes no literary pretence, by a high
literary standard. We are willing to accept
the fruits of Mr. Fitzball's dramatic experience
good-humouredly, when they are worth
gathering; and when they are not, we can
easily accept the alternative of leaving them
on the tree.

BAD BARGAINS

I know I was a bad bargain; one of the
worst the East India Company ever had, and
that is saying a good deal. I am not ashamed
of it—never was. On the contrary, I always
gloried in the reflection. My talents and
energies were sold to the East India Company,
and, if they were not worth the price,
that was the Company's look-out. I repeat
that I was, and am, proud of being a bad
bargain. But, for the matter of that, was
not the Court of Directors, for more than
one generation, a bad bargain to the British
nation?

I did not want to become a Bengal
civilian.  Not I. I would have preferred
serving behind the counter of my father's
shop in the West End, rather than go abroad,
especially to a hot country. But my father
had made up his mind, and so I was forced
to accept the writership which one of the
directors bestowed upon me. What my
father gave for it I don't know, as I didn't
care I never asked. My father had
tremendous influence with nearly all the
directors, and got more cadetships for
ambitious tradesmen's sons than any man of his
day, although he was only the keeper of a
large oil and Italian warehouse.

I could not pass an examination at Haileybury,
for I was only master of a very, very
small quantity of Latin, and knew not a
word of Greek. I was always very dull at
languages. Nor can I say that I was well
read in the literature of my own country.
I mean, I had never dipped into heavy
books, such as Gibbon or Jeremy Bentham,
Smith's Wealth of Nations, and the like,
though I often marvelled how other people
could get through them. I could write a
good hand of course, but it was more like that
of a mercantile clerk than a gentleman. So