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Riccoboni wrote to Garrick on May 3, 1769: 'Vous conviendrez que les nobles sont peu ménagés par vos auteurs; le sot, le fat, ou le malhonnête homme mêlé dans l'intrigue est presque toujours un lord. Garrick Corres, ii. 561. Dr.
Some fifteen years seemed to have been taken from the age of this buxom and simple-hearted patrician. He began to discuss with Logan all conceivable reasons why the Prince's director had rather discouraged his idea of closing the gambling-rooms for ever. 'The Father, Father Riccoboni, is a Jesuit, Mr. Logan, said the Earl gravely.
Thus unwittingly the people of the medieval church were gathering into a loose, but by no means unformed, union the same materials as the ancients used in the creation of their drama. The earnest Lewis Riccoboni holds that the Fraternity of the Gonfalone, founded in 1264, was accustomed to enact the Passion in the Coliseum, and that these performances lasted till Paul III abolished them in 1549.
"Lazzi," mentions Riccoboni, in his "Histoire du Theâtre Italien," is a term corrupted from the old Tuscan Lacci, which signifies a knot, or something that connects.
Of Extemporal Comedies, Riccoboni mentions that: "This kind of spectacle is peculiar to Italy; one cannot deny that it has graces perfectly its own, and which written Comedy can never exhibit. This impromptu mode of acting furnishes opportunities for a perpetual change in the performance, so that the same Scenario repeated still appears a new one: thus one Comedy may become twenty Comedies.
Of this she has nothing unless the most conventional of eighteenth-century phraseology, dashed with a kind of marivaudage which may perhaps seem original to those who do not know Marivaux's French followers, shall deserve the name. She is indeed very much of an English Madame Riccoboni.
She would have kept up the discussion, but her husband, a man eighty years of age, told her that she was wrong. She held her tongue, but from that time she told everybody that I was an impostor. Her husband, Louis Riccoboni, better known as Lelio, was the same who had brought the Italian company to Paris in 1716, and placed it at the service of the regent: he was a man of great merit.
Meanwhile Logan and the Jesuit amused the excellent Lady Mary as best they might, which was not saying much. Lady Mary, though extremely amiable, was far from brilliant, and never having met a Jesuit before, she regarded Father Riccoboni with a certain hereditary horror, as an animal of a rare species, and, of habits perhaps startling and certainly perfidious.
Riccoboni argues that not the performance was interdicted, but the use of the Coliseum. This matters not greatly, since it is perfectly certain that out-door performances of the Passion took place long before 1549. Those which were given in France were extremely interesting and in regard to them we have important records.
He routed the Jesuit out of the library, where he was absorbed in a folio containing the works of the sainted Father Parsons, and then the Earl showed Logan and Father Riccoboni over the house. From a window of the gallery Scremerston could be descried playing croquet with Miss Willoughby, an apparition radiant in white.
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