is the ugliest fellow of us three; I, old Cranky, or that gentleman in the front row of the balcony-box?” Here he pointed to Reynolds, who hastened to abandon his position.  Parsons was exceedingly angry at the interruption, but the audience appear to have tolerated, and even enjoyed the gag.  As Reynolds himself leniently writes:  “Many performers before and since the days of Edwin have acquired the power, by private winks, irrelevant buffoonery and dialogue, to make their fellow-players laugh, and thus confound the audience and mar the scene; Edwin, disdaining this confined and distracting system, established a sort of entre-nous-ship (if I may venture to use the expression) with the audience, and made them his confidants; and though wrong in his principle, yet so neatly and skilfully did he execute it, that instead of injuring the business of the stage, he frequently enriched it.”

Edwin seems, indeed, to have been an actor of some genius, notwithstanding his “extravasations of whim,” and an habitual intemperance, which probably hastened the close of his professional career—­for the man was a shameless sot.  “I have often seen him,” writes Boaden, “brought to the stage-door, senseless and motionless, lying at the bottom of a coach.”  Yet, if he could but be made to assume his stage-clothes, and pushed towards the lamps, he would rub his eyes for a moment, and then consciousness and extraordinary humour returned to him together, and his acting suffered in no way from the excesses which had overwhelmed him.  Eccentricity was his forte, and it was usually found necessary to have characters expressly written for him; but there can be no doubt that he was very highly esteemed by the playgoers of his time, who viewed his loss to the stage as quite irreparable.

But of the comedians it may be said, that they not only “gag” themselves, but they are the cause of “gagging” in others.  Their interpolations are regarded as heirlooms in the Thespian family.  It is the comic actor’s constant plea, when charged with adding to some famous part, that he has only been true to the traditions of previous performers.  One of the most notable instances of established gag is the burlesque sermon introduced by Mawworm, in the last scene of “The Hypocrite.”  This was originated by Mathews, who first undertook the part at the Lyceum in 1809, and who designed a caricature of an extravagant preacher of the Whitfield school, known as Daddy Berridge, whose strange discourses at the Tabernacle in the Tottenham Court Road had grievously afflicted the actor in his youth.  Mawworm’s sermon met with extraordinary success; on some occasions it was even encored, and the comedy has never since been presented without this supreme effort of gag.  Liston borrowed the address from Mathews, and gained for it so great an amount of fame, that the real contriver of the interpolation had reason to complain of being deprived of such credit as was due to him in the matter.  The sermon is certainly irresistibly comical, and a fair outgrowth of the character of Mawworm; at the same time it must be observed that Mawworm is himself an excrescence upon the comedy, having no existence in Cibber’s “Non-Juror,” upon which “The Hypocrite” is founded, or in “Tartuffe,” from whence Cibber derived the subject of his play.