"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 _début_, 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