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PLAY PANORAMIC OR ULTRA-SENSATIONAL 85
because its beggars, police, paupers and swells showed the " extremes of St. James's and Giles's ", on top of which a real hansom drove up to the make-believe toll-keeper's box by the canvas Waterloo Bridge, and The Railway Station realized " Frith's celebrated picture ". If all this should be considered epoch-making, it was not acclaimed as such by Drury Lane, which employed Halliday in future upon costume dramas mostly based on Scott. Nor, according to outsize playbills sold in the streets like newspapers, did the Adelphi change. In the early 1870s its stage sparkled with stars of the early 1840s. Ben Webster himself returned to the footlights during the 1873 boom in Wandering Jews. The Adelphi came first with one by Leopold Lewis. Webster took a leading part. His legs gave way and he sat down suddenly on the stage. Characters who had sworn never to stretch out a hand to him even if he were drowning, helped him gently to his feet. After that he decided to go on tour. In 1 875 he retired finally. His farewell benefit at Drury Lane had help from all London's leading players, and 2,000 guineas was the record result. Not long afterwards he was given up for dead : " Well, sir ! I felt a queer suffocating sensation ; something was over my face. I snatched away the sheet — for such it was. I was alone. But there was a light in the room. So I got out of bed, put on my dressing-gown and slippers, and went down into the parlour. There, sir, sat my friends, drinking whiskey and water — my whiskey, sir — and saying, ' Well, poor old Ben's gone at last ! ' ' Am I ? ' said I. You may guess what a turn the fellows had. But I was not going to let off the doctor, you know. We guessed he hadn't gone far. I dressed quickly; and, true enough, we found him at a neighbouring pothouse, sitting with his back to the door, and eating tripe and onions, sir, with a gin bottle by his side, quite comfortable. ' A pretty fellow you are to send me out of the world before my time ! ' I shouted. We all thought he was going off in a fit then and there, instead of me."
In the July of 1882 Webster really did die. To the last he had kept his name on the Adelphi playbills, as sole proprietor, and his ghost seemed to reign there for a few more years because of the * grand revivals " of melodramas celebrated in his day. These included Uncle Tom's Cabin in the same bill as a Christmas pantomime, besides a ventriloquial performance by Lieutenant Cole, whose dummy added to the language the once-prevalent catch-phrase of, " Chuck it, Cole ". Old plays were still preferred to new even though new actresses were preferred to old. Lydia Foote, whose assumed surname concealed the unseemly reality of Legge, was glamorous enough to justify a revival of Lost In London. There was masculine glamour to match hers when