Care, that troubles all the world, was forgotten in his composition.  Had he had but two grains (nay, half a grain) of it, he could never have supported himself upon those two spider’s strings, which served him (in the latter part of his unmixed existence) as legs.  A doubt or a scruple must have made him totter, a sigh have puffed him down; the weight of a frown had staggered him, a wrinkle made him lose his balance.  But on he went, scrambling upon those airy stilts of his, with Robin Good-Fellow, “thorough brake, thorough briar,” reckless of a scratched face or a torn doublet.

Shakspeare foresaw him, when he framed his fools and jesters.  They have all the true Suett stamp, a loose and shambling gait, a slippery tongue, this last the ready midwife to a without-pain-delivered jest; in words, light as air, venting truths deep as the centre; with idlest rhymes tagging conceit when busiest, singing with Lear in the tempest, or Sir Toby at the buttery-hatch.

Jack Bannister and he had the fortune to be more of personal favourites with the town than any actors before or after.  The difference, I take it, was this:—­Jack was more beloved for his sweet, good-natured, moral pretensions.  Dicky was more liked for his sweet, good-natured, no pretensions at all.  Your whole conscience stirred with Bannister’s performance of Walter in the Children in the Wood—­but Dicky seemed like a thing, as Shakspeare says of Love, too young to know what conscience is.  He put us into Vesta’s days.  Evil fled before him—­not as from Jack, as from an antagonist,—­but because it could not touch him, any more than a cannon-ball a fly.  He was delivered from the burthen of that death; and, when Death came himself, not in metaphor, to fetch Dicky, it is recorded of him by Robert Palmer, who kindly watched his exit, that he received the last stroke, neither varying his accustomed tranquillity, nor tune, with the simple exclamation, worthy to have been recorded in his epitaph—­O La!  O La!  Bobby!

The elder Palmer (of stage-treading celebrity) commonly played Sir Toby in those days; but there is a solidity of wit in the jests of that half-Falstaff which he did not quite fill out.  He was as much too showy as Moody (who sometimes took the part) was dry and sottish.  In sock or buskin there was an air of swaggering gentility about Jack Palmer.  He was a gentleman with a slight infusion of the footman.  His brother Bob (of recenter memory) who was his shadow in every thing while he lived, and dwindled into less than a shadow afterwards—­was a gentleman with a little stronger infusion of the latter ingredient; that was all.  It is amazing how a little of the more or less makes a difference in these things.  When you saw Bobby in the Duke’s Servant,[3] you said, what a pity such a pretty fellow was only a servant.  When you saw Jack figuring in Captain Absolute, you thought you could trace his promotion to some lady of quality who fancied the handsome fellow in his topknot, and had bought him a commission.  Therefore Jack in Dick Amlet was insuperable.