R,CHARD MONCKTON MILNES was born in the year - OUDL Home

The Theatre in the 'Seventies 153a couple of ambitious plays described as original—'TwixtAxe and Crown and Joan of Arc. I have not read theseplays—produced as a vehicle for the talent of a ladyknown as 'the beautiful Mrs Rousby'—but I saw themboth; and I recollect that I could never make out whetherI was listening to prose which sounded like verse or versewhich sounded like prose. At any rate, after I had contemplatedthe beauty of Mrs Rousby for five minutes,'Twixt Axe and Crown and Joan of Arc became, to myboyish taste, exceedingly tedious.Why have I left Byron to the last; why did I put himaside a little while ago, reserving him till I have almostreached the end of this Paper? My explanation that otherpersons, from an artistic point of view, were entitled topriority was the merest excuse. Having said that he wasthe first to respond to the impetus given by Robertson,I seem deliberately to have cold-shouldered him. Howdeceptive are appearances! Like the child who pushessome dainty scrap of food to the edge of his plate—a plum,a morsel of jam, or what not—keeping the tit-bit to theend of his meal, so I, cunningly, for my own enjoyment,have kept back Byron. I confess I have a sneakingfondness for that good-natured, easy-going, handsomeman, and I wish I could defend him whole-heartedly fromthe charges brought against him that he was in hiscomedies the mere joker that he was in his burlesques,that his plots were poor and stagey, that his characterizationwas conventional to a degree, his dialogue, thoughoften clever and amusing, overladen with strained reparteeand outrageous puns; that, in short, in the guiseof a serious dramatist and a critic of life, he was nothingbut a purveyor of cockney vulgarity of the most extravagantkind. I fear much of this is well-founded, but Ithink the dispraise is excessive. I admit that Byron wastoo often ready to sacrifice probability and appropriate-