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346                        MEMOIRS 03? JOSEPH GBIMALDI.

immediately the amount of one quarter in advance. His fears
vanished at once, and he felt that want at all events could never
he his portion.*

It can be observed at no better place than this, that all appli-
cations for relief from these funds are known only to the respect
tive committees, and that the names of all annuitants are kept
strictly secret during their lives; that the distribution of their
property is confided to gentlemen accustomed to act with the
utmost delicacy and discrimination, and that some of the greatest
ornaments of the English stage have been relieved in their old
age, when their powers of amusing and delighting were gone,—
not as poor pensioners, or objects of compassion, but as persons
who, not forgetting their poor brethren in their affluence, were
not themselves forgotten, when unexpected misfortune or sick-
ness fell upon them.

The unfortunate young man to whom allusion has been fre-
quently made in the course of the last few pages, was, as may
easily be imagined, one of the chief sources of (MmaMi's care
and trouble in his latter days. After remaining in his house
for two months in a state of madness, he grew better, left one
night to attend Sadler's 'Wells, where he was engaged, and was
seen no more until the middle of the following year, when he

* Mr. Harley, as master of the Drury Lane Fund, at the Annual Dinner of
that glorious charity, in the June following Q-rimaldi's death, thus alluded to the
assistance which the benevolence of their patrons had conferred on the distin-
guished mime:—"Yet shall delicacy suffer no violence in adducing one example,
for death has hushed his cock-crowing cacchination and uproarious merriment.
The mortal Jupiter of practical joke—the Michael Angelo of buffoonery, who, if
he was GMm-all-day, was sure to make you, chuckle at night, he was rendered
happy by your bounty. Yes, sirs, this star of eccentric brilliancy in the
laughing hemisphere of fun and drollery—this comical reminiscence of ' Me and
my Neddy,' ' Mother Goose,' ' Hot Cockles,' and ' Tippitywitchet,' would hare
set in sorrow but for this institution. You raised his drooping spirit, borne
down by domestic calamity; you sustained his sinking frame, prostrated by
premature decrepitude; and sheltered him in honourable retirement 1 Away
then with the gloom of fanaticism and the cant of hypocrisy, obscuring the bright
face of wit and genius! This is true philanthropy, that buries not its gold in
ostentatious charity, but builds its hospital in the human heart." from the overflowing of the pit." Grimaldi sang oa these last six nights