Star.
London, England, 1822-10-21 00:00:00

111 R. SU ETT.

O for a "slip-shod muse," to celebrate in numbers,
loose and shambling as himself the merits and the
person of Mr. Richard Suett, comedian !
Richard, or rather Dicky Suett—for so in his life-
time he was best pleased to be called, and time bath
ratified the appellation—lieth buried on the north side
of the cemetery of Holy Paul, to whose service his
non-age and tender years were set apart and dedicated.
There are who do yet remember him at that period-,-.
his pipe clear and harmonious. He would often speak
of his chorister days, when he was " cherub Dicky."
Whit clipped his wings, or made it expedient that
he should exchange the holy for the profane state;
whether be had lost hii good voice (his best recom-
mendation to that office), like Sir John, " with hal-
looing and singing of Anthems or whether he was
adjudged to lack something, even in those early
years, of the gravity indispensable to an occupation
which professed) to " commerce with the skies".-1
could never rightly learn ; but we find him, after
the probation of a twelvemonth or so, reverting to a
secular condition, and become one of us.
I think he was not altogether of that timber, out of
which cathedral seats and sounding-boards are hewed..
But if a glad heart—kind and therefore glad—be any
part of sanctity, then might the robe of Motley, with
which he invested himself with sn much humility after
his deprivation,, and which he wore so long with so
much blameless satisfaction to himself and to the pub-
lic, be accepted for a surplice—his white stole, and a*.
The first fruits of his secularization was an engage-
ment upon the boards of Old Drury, at which neat e
he commenced, as I have been told, with adopting
the manner of Parsons in old men's characters. At the
period in which most of us knew him, he was no mere
an imitator than he was is any true.sense himself
.imitable. He was the Robin Good-Fellow of the stage:
He came in to trouble all things with a welcome per-
plexity, himself no whit troubled for the matter. He
was known, like Puck, by his note—Hd! Ha ! Het !
sometimes deepening to Ho ! Ho.! Ho ! with an ir-
resistible accession, derived perhaps remotely from his
ecclesiastical education, fcreign to his prototype of-
-0 La! Thousands of hearts yet respond to the
chuckling 0 La! of Dicky Suett, brought back to
remembrance by the-faithful transcript of his
ft iend Mathews's mimicry. The " force of nature
could no further, zo." He drolled upon the 4tock of
these two syllables richer than the cuckoo.
Care, that troubles all the world, was forgotten
in his composition. Had he. bad but two grains
(nay, half a grain) of it, he could never have sup-
ported himself upon those two spider's strings, which
served him :Sin the latter part of his unmixed exist-

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But we were .not to escape so easily. No sown'
did we fall into slumbers than the same image, only
more perplexing, assailed us in the shape of dreanis.
Not one Minden,' but five hundred, were dancing
before us, like the faces which, wlether you will ur
no, come when you have been taking opium—all
the -trange combinations which this strangest of ell
strange mortals ever shot his proper countenance
into, from the Jay he came commissioned to dry up.
the tears of the town for the lossnof the now almost
forgotten Eiwiti. 0 for the poser of the pencil ko
have fixed them when we awoke! •A season or two
since there was exhibited a llogarth gallery. We des
not see why there should not be a Munden gallery.
In richness and variety the latter would not fall far
short of the former.•

There is one face of Farley, one face of Knight,
one face (but what a one it is!) of Liston r but Mun-
den has none that you can properly pin down, and
call his. When you think he has exhausted h4bata
tery of looks, in unaccountable warfare with your
gravity, suddenly he sprouts out an entirely new set
of features, like Hydra. Ile is not one, bat a legion.
Not so much a comedian, as a company. it his
name could be multiplied like his countenance, it
might fill a play-bill. He, and he alone, literally
imakes faces : applied to any other person, the phrase
lis a m'ere figure, denoting ceitain modifications of
the human cow:ten:lnce. Out of some invisible
wardrobe he dips for faces, as his friend Suett used
for wigs, and fetches them out as easily. We should
not be surprised to see him some day put out the head
of a river horse; or come forth a pewit, or lapwing,
or some feathered 'metamorphosis.
We have seen this gifted actor in .Sir 'Christopher
Curry—in Old Dornion—diffuse a glow of semis
ment which has made the pulse of a crowded theatre
beat like that of one man; when he has come in aid
of the pulpit, doing good to the moral heart of a
people. We have seen some faint approaches to this
sort of excellence in other players. Bu: in what has
been truly denominated the " sublime of farce," 'Stun-
den standsout as single and unaccompanied asHogarth,
trogarili; strange to tell, had no followers. The
school of Munden began, and must end with himself.
'Can any man wonder, like him ? can any man see
ghosts, like him? or fight with his own shadow—sessa—,
its-he does in that strangely-neglected thing, the Cob-
bler of Preston—where his alternations from the Cob•
bier to the Nagnitico, and from the Magnifico to the
Cobbler, keep the brain of the spectator in as wild a
ferment as if some Arabian Night were being acted
.before him, or as if Thalaba were rip tale! Who
like him Can throw, or ever attempted to throw, a
supernatural interest over the commonest daily-life
objects? A ale or a joint-stool, in his conception,
rises into a dignity equivalent to Cassiopeia's chair.
It is invested with constellatory importance. You
cannot speak of it With snore deference, if it were
mounted into the .firmament. A beggar in the
hands of Michael Anger°, says tuieli - rose the Pa-
triarcli'of koquit: ' SO the gusto of Muaden anti-
'Oates And ennobles wh:it it touches. His pots and
Ms ladles are as grand and primal as the seething-
pots and hooks seen in old prophetic vision. A tub
of butter, contemplifed by .him, Amounts to a Pla-
tonic idea. Ile under stands a loiol mutton in its
quiddity, • He stands wondering 'mid the coMmon-
plaice materials of life, lik. priraavai man, with the
sun and-stars about him. ILIA.