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Updated: September 11, 2025
There is no case where the fitness of things is more compulsory than in the association of figures with landscape. The haymaker creates a sensation on Broadway but no more so than Dundreary crossing a plowed field in Oxford ties.
Our aristocracy have a fine delicate sense of humour, and the success, artistic and pecuniary, of "Artemus Ward" would have rivalled that of the famous "Lord Dundreary." There are many stupid people who did not understand the "fun" of Artemus Ward's books. In their vernacular "they didn't see it."
In our day and country the actor who creates one rôle in the way Lemaitre created a score is a made man in his profession. Jefferson created Rip Van Winkle Sothern created Dundreary.
The play was "Our American Cousin," a play in which the part of Lord Dundreary was afterwards developed and made famous. Some time after 10 o'clock, at a point in the play which it is said no person present could afterwards remember, a shot was heard in the theatre and Abraham Lincoln fell forward upon the front of the box unconscious and dying.
It consisted of only a few lines and Sothern accepted it under protest, but he made such a hit in it that it was amplified and became the principal part of the play. In fact, the play became, in the end, a series of monologues for Dundreary. It had some remarkable runs, one, for instance, in London, for four hundred and ninety-six consecutive nights.
He was a man of about the middle size, with a face rather bronzed and reddened by climate, a nose slightly aquiline and higher in colour, quick black eyes with an uneasy glance in them, bushy black whiskers, more like the antiquated "Dundreary" type than modern fashion permits, and a wide flexible mouth.
The French might give some valuable lessons to Americans, especially in journalism. Mrs. "If the tail were large enough," said Dundreary, "the tail would waggle the dog!" certainly the tail end of society wags its journals. Mrs. Croly said:
Though really, after all, it don't much matter; because as Lord Dundreary and others would put it nobody but men have hippopotamuses in their brains; so, if a hippopotamus was discovered in an ape's brain, why it would not be one, you know, but something else.
The only other persons at the tea-table the Meadowses having arrived late were an elderly man with long Dundreary whiskers, in a Panama hat and a white waistcoat, and a lady of uncertain age, plump, kind-eyed, and merry-mouthed, in whom Doris had at once divined a possible harbour of refuge from the terrors of the situation.
Jefferson have told the story of Tom Taylor's extravaganza, "Our American Cousin," in which the one as Dundreary, the other as Asa Trenchard, rose to almost instant popularity and fame. I shall not repeat it except to say that Jefferson's Asa Trenchard was unlike any other the English or American stage has known.
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