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JOHNS

It is now not far short of at Trinity College, Can agreeable men I ever met valued friend, Tom Taylo or being told that he ha taking his B.A. degree, half a century was the $1 pleasant, open countenan height, not too spare, but the opening of his manli shrewd, intelligent eye, t fine physique, with the the former of which has the latter has long since a younger man's, white barrister, one of the rea our English Bar, talki said it was an extraordin on his head, his whisker said the future Whig ( jaws have had far more be said of the subject of head of our time has do the highest description,

They have a renowned hero in ancient Irish history called "Con of the Hundred Battles," in every one of which he came off victorious. Taylor's biographer can speak with equal confidence of Tom of the Hundred Dramas, not one of which was a failure or a bad one.

As Ovid lisped in numbers,

"Et quod tentabat scribere versus erat !”

so did our predestined dramatist shew almost from his infancy a genius not only for the poetry and literature of the drama but for the practical details of play-craft and the stage itself. He too, shewing the natural bent of his inclination, lisped in numbers, if we may fairly allot a mode of the lyre to dramatic declamation.

"From his earliest years," says one of Mr. Taylor's biographers, a fews years back, in The Illustrated Review, "he had evidenced a strong predilection for the histrionic art, and—even as a child in the nursery, and still more as a schoolboy, who, among his mates, was always Master of the Revels-for dramatic composition. As a mere urchin, before he had come to be pinned down to his Delectus or his Gradus ad Parnassum, he had been fond of writing and acting little plays for the delight of his sisters and brothers. The paternal cow-byre, the loft over the stable, or the saddle-room used to be the scene of their mimic theatre-Tom Taylor himself always holding the double office of manager and playwright. Thunder and lightning played no unimportant part in these highly sensational and melo-dramatic entertainments, insomuch that they were at last suppressed by authority, through a not unnatural fear that the crackling rosin of the thunderbolts discharged in such near neighbourhood to the straw and hay and other cattle fodder might end, one of these fine evenings, in a conflagration. Like Hans Christian Andersen, again-only at an earlier date, when Tom Taylor was a mere child, instead of, as was the case with poor unlettered Hans, as a hobbledehoy of eighteen-he had a passion for making and dressing puppets and for composing plays for them, in which these rudely contrived marionnettes took the parts of the various dramatis persona. Here, once more, was a verification of Wordsworth's oddly inverted phrase about the child being father to the man. Here was another Wilhelm Meister in miniature, serving his apprenticeship. A literary or a dramatic turn was somehow always discernible in Tom Taylor's childish or boyish amusements. Among the Grange schoolboys he would often take his stand in the midst of a laughing circle as the pretended showman of a suddenly improvised museum. Whatever rubbish was brought to him by handsful, he would define, article by article, with some aptly comic description, or

They have a renowned hero in ancient Irish history called "Con of the Hundred Battles," in every one of which he came off victorious. Taylor's biographer can speak with equal confidence of Tom of the Hundred Dramas, not one of which was a failure or a bad one.

As Ovid lisped in numbers,

"Et quod tentabat scribere versus erat!”

so did our predestined dramatist shew almost from his infancy a genius not only for the poetry and literature of the drama but for the practical details of play-craft and the stage itself. He too, shewing the natural bent of his inclination, lisped in numbers, if we may fairly allot a mode of the lyre to dramatic declamation.

"From his earliest years," says one of Mr. Taylor's biographers, a fews years back, in The Illustrated Review, "he had evidenced a strong predilection for the histrionic art, and—even as a child in the nursery, and still more as a schoolboy, who, among his mates, was always Master of the Revels for dramatic composition. As a mere urchin, before he had come to be pinned down to his Delectus or his Gradus ad Parnassum, he had been fond of writing and acting little plays for the delight of his sisters and brothers. The paternal cow-byre, the loft over the stable, or the saddle-room used to be the scene of their mimic theatre-Tom Taylor himself always holding the double office of manager and playwright. Thunder and lightning played no unimportant part in these highly sensational and melo-dramatic entertainments, insomuch that they were at last suppressed by authority, through a not unnatural fear that the crackling rosin of the thunderbolts discharged in such near neighbourhood to the straw and hay and other cattle fodder might end, one of these fine evenings, in a conflagration. Like Hans Christian Andersen, again-only at an earlier date, when Tom Taylor was a mere child, instead of, as was the case with poor unlettered Hans, as a hobbledehoy of eighteen-he had a passion for making and dressing puppets and for composing plays for them, in which these rudely contrived marionnettes took the parts of the various dramatis persona. Here, once more, was a verification of Wordsworth's oddly inverted phrase about the child being father to the man. Here was another Wilhelm Meister in miniature, serving his apprenticeship. A literary or a dramatic turn was somehow always discernible in Tom Taylor's childish or boyish amusements. Among the Grange schoolboys he would often take his stand in the midst of a laughing circle as the pretended showman of a suddenly improvised museum. Whatever rubbish was brought to him by handsful, he would define, article by article, with some aptly comic description, or

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