The Sun.
London, England, 1861-04-29 00:00:00

CABINET OF CURIOSITIES

At Christmas, Mr. Wooossi opened this his third
entertainment. And, recollect, " the third—[cer-
tainly in this instance]—is the charm !" Already
Four Months have elapsed since " The Cabinet of
Curiosities" was first of all unlocked—appropriately
enough upon Boxing Night; and ever since then,
with the solitary intermission of the one exceptional
week immediately preceding Easter, the Polygra-
phic Hall has been crowded day after day with
those lovers of fun whose delight is expressed alter-
nately throngh rounds of applause and peals of
laughter.
Everybody is familiarly acquainted with Mr.
Woodin by this time. Insomuch that ho may be
set down confidently as ono of the best known men
in the United kingdom—not in the metropolis
merely, but all through the provinces, in England,
Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and, we dare say, even in
that little imperiutn ?n imperio yclept Berwick-
upon-Tweed. He has made the round of our forty
shires, including the counties Palatine. Like one
of our most popular novelists, he has forsaken the
beaten track and taken " Rambles Beyond Rail-
ways." Supposing his bumps of locality to bo as
well developed as his bumps of individuality
—and in that last mentioned particular don't
we all remember how truly "he speaks with
most miraculous organ !"—his memory of the cities,
boroughs, villages, hundreds (we might count them
by thousands) through which he has flitted during
the course of his provincial excursions, would ren-
der hien an invaluable reviser of a newly perfected
British Gazetteer. Talk of Sam Slick—as Mr.
Bernal Osborne talked of him after his discursive
speech of Thursday evening iu the House of Com-
mons, as an appropriate editor of " The Rambler "
—we would back Woodin in that particular against
a dozen Haliburtons.
Yet, after all—intimately acquainted though the
three kingdoms are by this time with this Human
Hydra, W. S. Woodin, a man who really seems to
have as many " heads" as the discourse of a Scotch
Controversialist—it appears to us scarcely further
back than the day before yesterday, when we had the
first surprise of attending his " a. no. 1" perform-
ance. Nevertheless, looking back to dates—we
find that no less than nine long, and to Mr. Woodin
busy, years have elapsed since this seeming event
of—just the day before yesterday ! It was during
the year after the Great Exhibition, it was in the
year of the coup d'etat that our new Master (of
the Revels) took all London by storm—with the
aid of the quiet little device (for all the world like
Somebody Else over the water) of one single night's
Entertainment. Our Imperial ally, we all recollect
—it was one of the most memorable little incidents
of 1848—set forth originally to take possession of
Paris, and through Paris, of France, carrying with
him Gast like Woodin !) a Carpet Bag. Hither
moreover came his imperial highness the Prince
President Woodin, in his turn eight years ago—as
another conquering embodiment of that mysterious
stranger the Man With the Carpet Bag. And when
he set resolutely to work unpacking it, upon that
firNt occasion of his public appearance in London in
the principal room of the old Adelaide cianers,
hard by St. Martin's-in-the-fields, it would have
been impossible even for Sir Charles Coldstream
himself, gazing in upon it through the most super-
cilious spyglass, to have asserted that there was
" nothing in it There seemed to be everything
in it in the way of good humour and comicality—
and not only everything, but everybody : old
and young, man and woman, short and tall,
stout and spindling—the victims of atrophy
and the sufferers from elephantiasis. After-
wards when that übiquitous Carpet Bag had
travelled pertinaciously hither and thither upon all
the railroads, on all the coaches, in all the post-
chases we might fancy of the United Kingdom, the
light-heeled bearer of it, the easily fitted wearer
of all its motley contents, returns amongst us here
in London not so much like " a giant" as like a
who's Caravan of Giants " refreshed," appearing
upon his second advent, not simply as the Man with
the Carpet Bag, but as that plastic and elastic
Jack-of-all-trades known in all large households as
the Odd Man. The man who can turn his hand to
anything--who can be for the nonce upon an in-
stant's notice, just anybody, Figaro la ! Figaro
si ! the Oddest of all Odd Men, as it hap-
pened, illustrating again in his own person
a very " Olio of Oddities !" Accomplishing
this, moreover, so successfully that without
wishing to be any more invidious than Cassio—all
London declared Number Tw, o, as compared with
Number One (until then, as became it, " taken care
of " sedulously) to be "more excellent than t'other.''
A preference chorussed during the last two or three
years all through these islands, all through this
little laughter-loving British Archipselago.
And now—"bock agen," asdeliberately as that canny
Scot who knew so well where he was the best off,
comes the young polyphonist to his old often-trodded
haunts in his own well-frequented Hall Polygra-
phic. As youthful as ever he is in appearance. As
though scarcely nine weeks, to say nothing of nine
yesrs, had elapsed since his earliest apparition in
London as the giver of these Entertainments.
His elegantly little theatre completely and in parts
exquisitely redecorated. His two little green tables
of yore transformed each of them now into—a
if the
same slim, smiling, voluble, bright - eyed

young Entertainer as ever his smooth

shaven face, in spite of all its manifold

contortions and tortuosities :of feature while im

personating his World of Characters, not yet seem

ingly, oven when scanned through the lens of an
opera glass, "up to a wrinkle"—his costume,
though (as a gentleman's evening dress, of course,
should be invariably) simply black and white, yet

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altogether, in spite of that, the very pink of per-
_ _ .. _.

fection. Yonder he stands before his audience,
when the curtain rises evening after evening in his

Polygraphic Hall telling them how glad he is to
see them again, and explaining to them—while he
is fitting on his white kid gloves—how, since they
last met there, he has, during his progress through
life, met with another singular variety of whimsi-
cal personages, whose introduction upon the scene
(extracting them one by one from his Cabinet of

Curiosities—into which they have been somehow

conjured and there carefully enshrined) will con

stitute the night's entertainment. After which—
hey ! Presto!—the wand of the Enchanter is

waved—and the audience for two hours afterwards

with the single intermission of merely ten minutes

between the first and second part of the per.

formanee) is to all intents and purposes
whisked away into the fairy regions of No-man's-
land—the stage of your true Polyphonist !

How possibly can Nv e now describe the quickness
. - -

the diversity, the completeness, the inimitable ela-

boration of all Mr. Woodin's nightly transform-

tions. Gifted though the ablest critic may be—

and it is superfluous to say that our modesty aspirep

not to that pre-eminence--as well might Mr. Hunt
the water-colourist himself (though he can depict
miraculously the rainbow sheen of a dead pilchard)

attempt to paint the hues of some expiring dolphin.
The spectator has scarcely begun to reconcile him-

self to the fact that Mr, Airoodin has expanded into
a Stout Gentleman let us say—some Stout Gentle-

man like one of their late Royal Highnesses—with a
double chin and an immense waistcoast, a voice like