these serious walks probably he was divesting himself of many scenic and some real vanities—­weaning himself from the frivolities of the lesser and the greater theatre—­doing gentle penance for a life of no very reprehensible fooleries,—­taking off by degrees the buffoon mask which he might feel he had worn too long—­and rehearsing for a more solemn cast of part.  Dying he “put on the weeds of Dominic."[2]

If few can remember Dodd, many yet living will not easily forget the pleasant creature, who in those days enacted the part of the Clown to Dodd’s Sir Andrew.—­Richard, or rather Dicky Suett—­for so in his life-time he delighted to be called, and time hath ratified the appellation—­lieth buried on the north side of the cemetery of Holy Paul, to whose service his nonage and tender years were dedicated.  There are who do yet remember him at that period—­his pipe clear and harmonious.  He would often speak of his chorister days, when he was “cherub Dicky.”

What clipped his wings, or made it expedient that he should exchange the holy for the profane state; whether he had lost his good voice (his best recommendation to that office), like Sir John, “with hallooing and singing of anthems;” or whether he was adjudged to lack something, even in those early years, of the gravity indispensable to an occupation which professeth to “commerce with the skies”—­I could never rightly learn; but we find him, after the probation of a twelvemonth or so, reverting to a secular condition, and become one of us.

I think he was not altogether of that timber, out of which cathedral seats and sounding boards are hewed.  But if a glad heart—­kind and therefore glad—­be any part of sanctity, then might the robe of Motley, with which he invested himself with so much humility after his deprivation, and which he wore so long with so much blameless satisfaction to himself and to the public, be accepted for a surplice—­his white stole, and albe.

The first fruits of his secularization was an engagement upon the boards of Old Drury, at which theatre he commenced, as I have been told, with adopting the manner of Parsons in old men’s characters.  At the period in which most of us knew him, he was no more an imitator than he was in any true sense himself imitable.

He was the Robin Good-Fellow of the stage.  He came in to trouble all things with a welcome perplexity, himself no whit troubled for the matter.  He was known, like Puck, by his note—­Ha!  Ha!  Ha!—­sometimes deepening to Ho!  Ho!  Ho! with an irresistible accession, derived perhaps remotely from his ecclesiastical education, foreign to his prototype of,—­O La! Thousands of hearts yet respond to the chuckling O La! of Dicky Suett, brought back to their remembrance by the faithful transcript of his friend Mathews’s mimicry.  The “force of nature could no further go.”  He drolled upon the stock of these two syllables richer than the cuckoo.