In the vignettes of the Bear-garden and the Swan Theatre, for
instance, the artist has managed to throw over his minute plate a
wonderful air of pleasantness, a light which, though very delicate,
is very theatrical. The river and its tiny craft, the little gabled
houses of the neighbourhood, with a garden or two dropped in, tell
delightfully in the general effect. They are worthy to rank with
Cruikshank's illustrations of Jack Sheppard and The Tower of London,
as mementoes of the little old smokeless London before the century of
Johnson, though that, too, as Dr. Doran bears witness, knew what fogs
could be. Then there is the Fortune Theatre near Cripplegate, and,
most charming of all, two views--street and river fronts--the Duke's
Theatre, Dorset Garden, in Fleet Street, designed by Wren, decorated
by Gibbons--graceful, naive, dainty, like the work of a very refined
Palladio, working minutely, perhaps more delicately than at Vicenza,
in the already crowded city on the Thames side.
[77] The portraits of actors and other theatrical celebrities range
from Elizabeth, from the melodramatic costumes and faces of the
contemporaries of Shakespeare, to the conventional costumes, the
rotund expression, of the age of the Georges, masking a power of
imaginative impersonation probably unknown in Shakespeare's day.
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