or small beer.  Still his precaution had its disadvantages.  The real claret he consumed might make his intemperance somewhat too genuine and accurate; and his portrayal of Cassio’s speedy return to sobriety might be in such wise very difficult of accomplishment.  So there have been players of dainty taste, who, required to eat in the presence of the audience, have elected to bring their own provisions, from some suspicion of the quality of the food provided by the management.  We have heard of a clown who, entering the theatre nightly to undertake the duties of his part, was observed to carry with him always a neat little paper parcel.  What did it contain? bystanders inquired of each other.  Well, in the comic scenes of pantomime it is not unusual to see a very small child, dressed perhaps as a charity-boy, crossing the stage, bearing in his hands a slice of bread-and-butter.  The clown steals this article of food and devours it; whereupon the child, crying aloud, pursues him hither and thither about the stage.  The incident always excites much amusement; for in pantomimes the world is turned upside-down, and moral principles have no existence; cruelty is only comical, and outrageous crime the best of jokes.  The paper parcel borne to the theatre by the clown under mention enclosed the bread-and-butter that was to figure in the harlequinade.  “You see I’m a particular feeder,” the performer explained.  “I can’t eat bread-and-butter of anyone’s cutting.  Besides, I’ve tried it, and they only afford salt butter.  I can’t stand that.  So as I’ve got to eat it and no mistake, with all the house looking at me, I cut a slice when I’m having my own tea, at home, and bring it down with me.”

Rather among the refreshments of the side-wings than of the stage must be counted that reeking tumbler of “very brown, very hot, and very strong brandy-and-water,” which, as Dr. Doran relates, was prepared for poor Edmund Kean, as, towards the close of his career, he was wont to stagger from before the foot-lights, and, overcome by his exertions and infirmities, to sink, “a helpless, speechless, fainting, bent-up mass,” into the chair placed in readiness to receive the shattered, ruined actor.  With Kean’s prototype in acting and in excess, George Frederick Cooke, it was less a question of stage or side-wing refreshments than of the measure of preliminary potation he had indulged in.  In what state would he come down to the theatre?  Upon the answer to that inquiry the entertainments of the night greatly depended.  “I was drunk the night before last,” Cooke said on one occasion; “still I acted, and they hissed me.  Last night I was drunk again, and I didn’t act; they hissed all the same.  There’s no knowing how to please the public.”  A fine actor, Cooke was also a genuine humorist, and it must be said for him, although a like excuse has been perhaps too often pleaded for such failings as his, that his senses gave way, and his brain became affected after very slight indulgence.  From this, however, he could not be persuaded to abstain, and so made havoc of his genius, and terminated, prematurely and ignobly enough, his professional career.