“We will now bring him over the seas again, and suppose him in the counting-house in Birchin Lane, his protector satisfied with the returns of his factorage, and all going on so smoothly that we may expect to find Mr. Liston at last an opulent merchant upon ’Change, as it is called.  But see the turns of destiny!  Upon a summer’s excursion into Norfolk, in the year 1801, the accidental sight of pretty Sally Parker, as she was called, (then in the Norwich company,) diverted his inclinations at once from commerce; and he became, in the language of commonplace biography, stage-struck.  Happy for the lovers of mirth was it that our hero took this turn; he might else have been to this hour that unentertaining character, a plodding London merchant.

“We accordingly find him shortly after making his debut, as it is called, upon the Norwich boards, in the season of that year, being then in the twenty-second year of his age.  Having a natural bent to tragedy, he chose the part of Pyrrhus in the ‘Distressed Mother,’ to Sally Parker’s Hermione.  We find him afterwards as Barnwell, Altamont, Chamont, etc.; but, as if Nature had destined him to the sock, an unavoidable infirmity absolutely discapacitated him for tragedy.  His person, at this latter period of which I have been speaking, was graceful, and even commanding; his countenance set to gravity; he had the power of arresting the attention of an audience at first sight almost beyond any other tragic actor.  But he could not hold it.  To understand this obstacle, we must go back a few years to those appalling reveries at Charnwood.  Those illusions, which had vanished before the dissipation of a less recluse life and more free society, now in his solitary tragic studies, and amid the intense calls upon feeling incident to tragic acting, came back upon him with tenfold vividness.  In the midst of some most pathetic passage, the parting of Jaffier with his dying friend, for instance, he would suddenly be surprised with a fit of violent horse-laughter.  While the spectators were all sobbing before him with emotion, suddenly one of those grotesque faces would peep out upon him, and he could not resist the impulse.  A timely excuse once or twice served his purpose; but no audiences could be expected to bear repeatedly this violation of the continuity of feeling.  He describes them (the illusions) as so many demons haunting him, and paralyzing every effect.  Even now, I am told, he cannot recite the famous soliloquy in ‘Hamlet,’ even in private, without immoderate bursts of laughter.  However, what he had not force of reason sufficient to overcome he had good sense enough to turn into emolument, and determined to make a commodity of his distemper.  He prudently exchanged the buskin for the sock, and the illusions instantly ceased; or, if they occurred for a short season, by their very cooperation added a zest to his comic vein,—­some of his most catching faces being (as he expresses it) little more than transcripts and copies of those extraordinary phantasmata.