Dr. Doran's book abounds, as might be expected, with admirable
impromptus and the like; one might collect a large posy of them.
Foote, seeing a sweep on a blood-horse, remarked, "There goes
Warburton on Shakespeare!" When he heard that the Rockingham Cabinet
was fatigued to death and at its wits' end, he exclaimed that it
could not have been the length of the journey which had tired it.
Again, when Lord Carmarthen, at a party, told him his handkerchief
was hanging from his pocket, Foote replaced [81] it with a "Thank
you, my lord; you know the company better than I." Jevon, a century
earlier, was in the habit of taking great liberties with authors and
audience. He made Settle half mad and the house ecstatic when
having, as Lycurgus, Prince of China, to "fall on his sword," he
placed it flat on the stage, and, falling over it, "died," according
to the direction of the acting copy. Quaint enough, but certainly no
instance of anybody's wit, is the account of how a French translation
of a play of Vanbrugh--not architect of Blenheim only, but
accomplished in many other ways--appeared at the Odeon, in 1862, with
all fitting raptures, as a posthumous work of Voltaire recently
discovered.
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