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THE IDIOT.--AN ANECDOTE.


Every reader of dramatic history has heard of Garrick's contest with
Madam Clairon, and the triumph which the English Roscius achieved over
the Siddons of the French stage, by his representation of the father
struck with fatuity on beholding his only infant child dashed to pieces
by leaping in its joy from his arms: perhaps the sole remaining conquest
for histrionic tragedy is somewhere in the unexplored regions of the
mind, below the ordinary understanding, amidst the gradations of
idiotcy. The various shades and degrees of sense and sensibility which
lie there unknown, Genius, in some gifted moment, may discover. In the
meantime, as a small specimen of its undivulged dramatic treasures, we
submit to our readers the following little anecdote:--

A poor widow, in a small town in the north of England, kept a booth or
stall of apples and sweetmeats. She had an idiot child, so utterly
helpless and dependent, that he did not appear to be ever alive to anger
or self-defence.

He sat all day at her feet, and seemed to be possessed of no other
sentiment of the human kind than confidence in his mother's love, and
a dread of the schoolboys, by whom he was often annoyed. His whole
occupation, as he sat on the ground, was in swinging backwards and
forwards, singing "pal-lal" in a low pathetic voice, only interrupted
at intervals on the appearance of any of his tormentors, when he clung
to his mother in alarm.