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It has stood a century, and probably will stand forever; and the most admired passages in what literary humbugs who pretend they know Shakespeare by the closet, not the stage, accept as Shakespeare's "Richard," are Cibber's. Mr.
A clear and somewhat shrill voice replied: "I know the way better than you, child;" and a stately old lady appeared on the threshold. "Bracegirdle," said Mr. Cibber. It may well be supposed that every eye was turned on this newcomer that Roxana for whom Mr. Cibber's story had prepared a peculiar interest. She was dressed in a rich green velvet gown with gold fringe.
I remember the following couplet in allusion to the King and himself: "Perch'd on the eagle's soaring wing, The lowly linnet loves to sing." Sir, he had heard something of the fabulous tale of the wren sitting upon the eagle's wing, and he had applied it to a linnet. Cibber's familiar style, however, was better than that which Whitehead has assumed. GRAND nonsense is insupportable.
His poems, taken in the mass, stand far higher than his prose works. His official Odes indeed, among which the Vision of Judgement must be classed, are, for the most part, worse than Pye's and as bad as Cibber's; nor do we think him generally happy in short pieces. But his longer poems, though full of faults, are nevertheless very extraordinary productions.
"Oh, the little Irish orange-girl!" "Whose basket outweighed Colley Cibber's salary for the first twenty years of his dramatic career," was the delicate reply to the above delicate remark. It staggered him for a moment; however, he affected a most puzzled air, then gradually allowed a light to steal into his features.
That treatment of the character was, doubtless, in part a necessary consequence of Shakespeare's perfunctory adoption of the Tudor doctrine that Richard was a blood-boltered monster; but in a larger degree it was the result of Cibber's vulgar distortion of the original piece.
Flecknoe blunderingly classed among the Laureates by the compiler of "Cibber's Lives of the Poets" was an Irish priest, who had cast his cassock, or, as he euphuistically expressed it, "laid aside the mechanic part of priesthood," in order to fulfil the loftier mission of literary garreteer in London.
"Women born to be controll'd, Stoop to the forward and the bold." These lines, taken hap-hazard from Colley Cibber's "Careless Husband," contain the very spirit and essence of that old English comedy wherein the hero was nothing more than a handsome rake and the heroine well, not a straitlaced Puritan or a prude.
Cibber's countenance in that last scene you know in the "Orphan" Monimia you know, Devereux. And the table being by this time in high chat, and the chairs a little irregular, Puddock slipped off his, and addressing himself to Devereux and O'Flaherty just to give them a notion of Mrs. Cibber began, with a countenance the most wobegone, and in a piping falsetto
W. reads them to go to Heaven, and I to go into companies where, when the conversation upon French Politics is at a stand, it engrosses the chief of what we have to say. I have a design upon Botany Bay and Cibber's Apology for his own life, which everybody has read, and which I should have read myself forty years ago, if I had not preferred the reading of men so much to that of books.
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