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TOOLE AND MATHEWS
finesse, and dexterity. Sometimes he
played in French. His enunciation was a
marvel of incisive and elegant precision,
effected with perfect ease, and often with
extreme velocity. In his utterance of the
lines of Captain Patter, in his father's
comedietta. Patter vs. Clatter, he per-
formed an amazing feat. There were in
the play six parts besides his own, the
total speeches of the six others being
uttered in three hundred words. The
drama occupied twenty minutes in repre-
sentation. Mr. Mathews's portion of the
dialogue was practically an unbroken
monologue of between seven thousand
and eight thousand words, which were de-
livered in eleven hundred seconds. His
talk went as a whirlwind moves, or as
the water used to come down at Lodore
when Southey's encouraging eye was on
it; but no ear of ordinary acuteness
needed to lose a syllable of his text
[
Si
]