did anybody ever look like her while she sang. Practical jokes of very
doubtful taste were the fashion of that day, and remembering what
wonderfully coarse and silly proceedings were then thought highly
diverting by "vastly genteel" people, it is not, perhaps, much to be
wondered at that so poor a piece of wit as this should have furnished
diversion to a couple of light-hearted girls, with no special
pretensions to elegance or education. Once they were driving together in
a post-chaise on the road to Newcastle, and my aunt, having at hand in a
box part of a military equipment intended for some farce, accoutred her
upper woman in a soldier's cap, stock, and jacket, and, with heavily
corked mustaches, persisted in embracing her companion, whose frantic
resistance, screams of laughter, and besmirched cheeks, elicited
comments of boundless amazement, in broad north-country dialect, from
the market folk they passed on the road, to whom they must have appeared
the most violent runaway couple that ever traveled.

Liston, the famous comedian, was at this time a member of the Durham
company, and though he began his career there by reciting Collins's "Ode
to the Passions," attired in a pea-green coat, buckskins, top-boots, and
powder, with a scroll in his hand, and followed up this essay of his
powers with the tragic actor's battle-horse, the part of Hamlet, he soon
found his peculiar gift to lie in the diametrically opposite direction
of broad farce. Of this he was perpetually interpolating original
specimens in the gravest performances of his fellow-actors; on one
occasion suddenly presenting to Mrs. Stephen Kemble, as she stood
disheveled at the side scene, ready to go on the stage as Ophelia in her
madness, a basket with carrots, turnips, onions, leeks, and pot-herbs,
instead of the conventional flowers and straws of the stage maniac,
which sent the representative of the fair Ophelia on in a broad grin,
with ill-suppressed fury and laughter, which must have given quite an