A player with Jack's talents, if we had one now, would not dare to do
the part in the same manner. He would instinctively avoid every turn
which might tend to unrealize, and so to make the character fascinating.
He must take his cue from his spectators, who would expect a bad man
and a good man as rigidly opposed to each other as the deathbeds of
those geniuses are contrasted in the prints, which I am sorry to say
have disappeared from the windows of my old friend Carrington Bowles,
of St. Paul's Churchyard memory--(an exhibition as venerable as the
adjacent cathedral, and almost coeval) of the bad and good man at the
hour of death; where the ghastly apprehensions of the former,--and
truly the grim phantom with his reality of a toasting-fork is not to
be despised,--so finely contrast with the meek complacent kissing of
the rod,--taking it in like honey and butter,--with which the latter
submits to the scythe of the gentle bleeder, Time, who wields his
lancet with the apprehensive finger of a popular young ladies' surgeon.
What flesh, like loving grass, would not covet to meet half-way the
stroke of such a delicate mower?
John Palmer was twice an actor in this exquisite part.
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