may be seen hurrying from Covent Garden back to their barracks.  Plays that have depended for their success solely upon the battles they have introduced have not been frequent of late years, and perhaps their popularity may fairly be counted as a thing of the past.  We have left behind us the times when versatile Mr. Gomersal was found submitting to the public by turns his impersonation of Napoleon at Waterloo and Sir Arthur Wellesley at Seringapatam; when Shaw, the Lifeguardsman, after performing prodigies of valour, died heroically to slow music; when Lady Sale, armed with pistol and sabre, fought against heavy Afghan odds, and came off supremely victorious.  Perhaps the public have ceased to care for history thus theatrically illustrated, or prefers to gather its information on the subject from despatches and special correspondence.  The last theatrical venture of this class referred to our army’s exploits in Abyssinia.  But the play did not greatly please.  Modern battles have, indeed, outgrown the stage, and the faculty of making “imaginary puissance” has become lost.  In the theatre, as elsewhere, the demand is now for the literal, the accurate, and the strictly matter of fact.

CHAPTER XXV.

STAGE STORMS.

Addison accounted “thunder and lightning—­which are often made use of at the descending of a god or the rising of a ghost, at the vanishing of a devil or the death of a tyrant”—­as occupying the first place “among the several artifices put in practice by the poets to fill the minds of an audience with terror.”  Certainly the stage owes much to its storms:  they have long been highly prized both by playwrights and playgoers, as awe-inspiring embellishments of the scene; and it must have been an early occupation of the theatrical machinist to devise some means of simulating the uproar of elemental strife.  So far back as 1571, in the “Accounts of the Revels at Court,” there appears a charge of L1 2s. paid to a certain John Izarde, for “mony to him due for his device in counterfeting thunder and lightning in the play of ‘Narcisses;’ and for sundry necessaries by him spent therein;” while to Robert Moore, the apothecary, a sum of L1 7s. 4d. is paid for “prepared corianders,” musk, clove, cinnamon, and ginger comfits, rose and “spike” water, “all which,” it is noted, “served for flakes of snow and haylestones in the maske of ‘Janus;’ the rose-water sweetened the balls made for snow-balls, and presented to her majesty by Janus.”  The storm in this masque must clearly have been of a very elegant and courtly kind, with sugar-plums for hailstones and perfumed water for rain.  The tempests of the public theatres were assuredly conducted after a ruder method.  In his prologue to “Every Man in his Humour,” Ben Jonson finds occasion to censure contemporary dramatists for the “ill customs” of their plays, and to warn the audience that his production is not as others are: