Born, in Florence, March (or April?), 1732. At Westminster School, 1746–51. To Ch. Ch., Oxford, 5 June 1751; B.A., 18 April 1755; M.A., 18 March 1758. Contributed to “The Student,” 1751; to Hawkesworth’s “The Adventurer,” Sept. 1753; ed. “The Connoisseur,” with Bonnell Thornton, Jan. 1754 to Sept. 1756. Called to Bar at Lincoln’s Inn, 1755. On Oxford Circuit, 1759. Farce, “Polly Honeycombe,” produced at Drury Lane, 5 Dec. 1760; “The Jealous Wife” produced, 12 Feb. 1761. Started “St James’s Chronicle,” with Bonnell Thornton and Garrick, 1761…. Purchased Covent Garden Theatre (with Powell, Harris, and Rutherford), and opened it, 14 Sept. 1767. Married Miss Ford, 1767 (?); she died, 29 March 1771…. Resigned management, 26 May 1774, and retired to Bath. Contrib. a series of papers called “The Gentleman” to “The London Packet,” July to Dec. 1775. A version of Ben Jonson’s “Epicœne,” produced at Drury Lane, 13 Jan. 1776; “The Spleen,” 7 March, 1776; “New Brooms,” 21 Sept. 1776. Manager of Haymarket, 1777–85…. Pall-bearer at Dr. Johnson’s funeral, 20 Dec. 1784. Paralytic stroke, 1785. Mind gradually gave way. Died, in Paddington, 14 Aug. 1794. Buried in vaults of Kensington Church. Works: “Polly Honeycombe” (anon.), 1760; “Ode to Obscurity” (anon.), 1760; “The Jealous Wife,” 1761; “Critical Reflections on the Old English Dramatick Writers” (anon.), 1761; “The Clandestine Marriage” (with Garrick), 1761; “The Musical Lady” (anon.), 1762; “The Deuce is in Him” (anon.), 1763; “Terræ Filius” (4 nos., anon.), 1764; “The English Merchant,” 1767; “T. Harris Dissected,” 1768; “True State of the Differences, etc.,” 1768 (2nd edn. same year); “Occasional Prelude,” 1768; “The Portrait (anon.; date misprinted MCCCLXX.), 1770; “Man and Wife” (anon.), 1770; “The Oxonian in Town” (anon.), 1769; “The Fairy Prince” (anon.), 1771; “The Man of Business,” 1774; “The Spleen,” 1776; “The Occasional Prelude,” 1776; “New Brooms,” 1776; “Dramatic Works,” 1777; “A Fairy Tale” (adapted, with Garrick, from “A Mid-summer Night’s Dream”), 1777; “The Sheep-shearing” (adapted from “Winter’s Tale”), 1777; “The Manager in Distress,” 1780; “Prose on Several Occasions,” 1787; “Tit for Tat” (anon.), 1788; “Ut Pictura Poesis,” 1789. Posthumous: “Some Particulars of the Life of the late George Colman, written by himself” (ed. by R. Jackson), 1795; “Miscellaneous Works,” 1797. He translated: Terence’s “Comedies,” 1765; Horace’s “Art of Poetry,” 1783; and edited: “Poems by Eminent Ladies” (with Bonnell Thornton), 1755; Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Philaster,” with alterations, 1763; “Comus,” altered from Milton, 1772; Jonson’s “Epicœne,” with alterations, 1776; Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Dramatic Works,” 1778; Foote’s “Devil Upon Two Sticks,” 1778; Foote’s “Maid of Bath,” 1788; Foote’s “The Nabob,” 1778; Foote’s “A Trip to Calais,” 1778; Lillo’s “Fatal Curiosity,” with alterations, 1783. Life: In Peake’s “Memoirs of the Colman Family,” 1841.

Personal

  MY DEAR SIR.—I have this moment taken a peep at the house, for the author of Polly Hon. The pit and galleries are crammed—the boxes full to the last rows—and every thing as you and I could wish for our friend. I am most happy about it, and could not help communicating it to one I so much love and esteem. Pray let me see you at your arrival—the second music—and time for me to put on my fool’s coat. Yours ever and most affectionately.

  He is one of the best tempered (though I believe very passionate) of men, lively, agreeable, open-hearted, and clever.

  I correspond again with Colman, and upon the most friendly footing, and find in his instance, and in some others, that an intimate intercourse which has been only casually suspended, not forfeited on either side by outrage, is capable not only of revival, but improvement.

  They never admitted Colman as one of the set; Sir Joshua did not invite him to dinner. If he had been in the room Goldsmith would have flown out of it, as if a dragon had been there. I remember Garrick once saying, “D—n his dishclout face! His plays would never do, if it were not for my patching them up and acting in them.” Another time he took a poem of Colman’s and read it backwards to turn it into ridicule. Yet some of his pieces keep possession of the stage, so that there must be something in them.

  His case was simply this; that he had gout in his habit, which had been indicated so slightly, that he neglected the hints to take care of himself which nature had mildly thrown out. Cold bathing is perhaps one of the most dangerous luxuries in which an elderly man can indulge, when so formidable an enemy is lurking in his constitution. The gout having been repelled by repeated submersion in the sea, not only paralyzed the body, but distempered the brain, and Reason was subverted. But, from the earliest sparks of his disorder at the end of 1785, till it blazed forth unequivocally in June, 1789, an interval of rather more than three years and a half, and again from the last mentioned year to the time of his decease, there was nothing of that “second childishness and mere oblivion,” which his biographers have attached to his memory. The assertion that his gradually increasing derangement left him in “a state of idiotism,” is directly the reverse of fact. His mind, instead of having grown progressively vacant till it became a blank, was, in the last stages of his malady, filled, like a cabalistic book, with delusions, and crowded with the wildest flights of morbid fancy; it was always active, always on the stretch; and, so far from his exhibiting that moping fatuity which obscured the last sad and silent days of Swift, it might have been said of him, “how pregnant sometimes his replies are! a happiness which reason and sanity would not so prosperously be delivered of.”

General

  I believe his Odes sell no more than mine did, for I saw a heap of them lie in a bookseller’s window, who recommended them to me as a very pretty thing.

  I have read Colman’s “Ars Poetica;” he is much too negligent a versifier, but easy and elegant.

  It is very much to the credit of that excellent writer Mr. Colman, that, while other dramatists were lost in the fashion of sentiment, his comedies always present the happiest medium of nature; without either affectation of sentiment, or affectation of wit. That the able translator of Terence should yet have sufficient force of mind to keep his own pieces clear of the declamatory dullness of that ancient, is certainly a matter deserving of much applause. The “Jealous Wife,” and the “Clandestine Marriage,” with others of his numerous dramas, may be mentioned as the most perfect models of comedy we have: to all the other requisites of fine comic writing they always add just as much sentiment and wit as does them good. This happy medium is the most difficult to hit all composition, and most declares the hand of a master.

  This elegant simplicity of Terence has met with an admirable vehicle in the well chosen and familiar blank verse of Colman.

  This comedy, by Colman the elder, was written in his youth; and, though he brought upon the stage no less than twenty-five dramas, including those he altered from Shakspeare and other writers, subsequent to this production, yet not one of them was ever so well received by the town, or appears to have deserved so well, as “The Jealous Wife.” To this observation, “The Clandestine Marriage” may possibly be an exception; but, in that work, Mr. Garrick was declared his joint labourer. It therefore appears, that Mr. Colman’s talents for dramatic writing declined, rather than improved, by experience—or, at least, his ardour abated; and all works of imagination require, both in conception and execution, a degree of enthusiasm…. Mrs. Oakly is, indeed, so complete a character from life, and so ably adapted to the stage by the genius of the writer, that, performed by an actress possessed of proper abilities for the part, the play might be well supported, were the wit, humor, and repartee, of every other character in the piece annihilated.

  In respect to the report of Garrick having written the entire character of Lord Ogleby, my father once told me that it was not true; that, as an instance to the contrary, he (my father) wrote the whole of Ogleby’s first scene. He also informed me that one of Garrick’s greatest merits in this work (and it is a very good one) was planning the incidents in the last act; the alarm of the families, through the means of Mrs. Heidelberg and Miss Sterling, and bringing forward the various characters from their beds to produce an explanation, and the catastrophe. I regret that when my father imparted this, I did not make further inquiry; but I was then “a moonish youth,” and troubled my head little or nothing about the matter. He always talked, however, of the play as a joint production…. It would be strange if Garrick robbed, or were accessory to his colleague’s robbing his friend Townley. In the two pieces, there may be some coincidence, without theft; but the ground work of “The Clandestine Marriage” was professedly suggested by Hogarth’s prints. At the worst, there is no great literary crime in catching hints, if any were caught, from an apparently stillborn farce, and improving upon them in a play of lasting vitality.

  His abilities as a dramatist were not more the subject of praise, than his punctuality as a manager, and his liberal encouragement to other writers for the stage. From the lamentable condition into which he had sunk, both mentally and bodily, his death must have been considered a happy release. A few hours before he expired, he was sized with violent spasms, and these were succeeded by melancholy stupor, in which he drew his last breath…. These dramas have considerable merit. In his petite pieces the plots are simple, yet they contain strong character, and aim at ridiculing fashionable and prevailing follies. His comedies have the same merit with the others, as to the preservation of character. The estimation in which the entertainments exhibited under his direction were held by the public, the reputation which the Haymarket Theatre acquired, and the continual concourse of the fashionable world during the height of summer, sufficiently spoke the praises of Mr. Colman’s management.

  Among the respectable dramatists of this period who exerted an influence in leading the public taste away from the witty and artificial schools of the Restoration, the two Colmans deserve mention.

  In 1760 he produced a farcical piece in one act, entitled “Polly Honeycombe,” in which the novel-reading propensities of the young ladies of the age were good-humouredly satirised. Honeycombe was the pseudonym of the editor of the “Royal Female Magazine,” which was chiefly made up of the silliest and most vapid sentimental novels. The skit was a complete success; but the author, on account of his relations with his uncle Bath, did not consider it prudent to declare himself. Early in the ensuing year he placed “The Jealous Wife” in Garrick’s hands; the underplot and the characters of Russet, Charles, Lord Trinket, and Lady Freelove were borrowed from “Tom Jones,” but Mr. and Mrs. Oakley and the Major are original creations. Probably the absurd side of jealousy has never been more felicitously ridiculed than in the best scenes of this comedy; but it appears to have gone through much revision, pruning, and condensation from the manager’s pen before it assumed its present shape. Garrick himself played Oakley, but he was not much at home in the part, and its success on the first night, which during the earlier part of the performance seemed rather doubtful, was ascribed entirely to Mrs. Pritchard’s fine acting as the wife. The comedy is still familiar to old playgoers, and perhaps the two leading characters were never more admirably performed than they were some few years ago at Drury Lane by Phelps and Mrs. Hermann Vezin.

  Colman was a man of tact, enterprise, and taste; his plays are ingenious and occasionally brilliant, and more than one of them remains on the acting list. The characters are as a rule well drawn, and types of living eccentricity are well hit off.

  It occurred to Garrick and to George Colman that an entertaining drama might be drawn up on the lines of Hogarth’s “Marriage à la Mode,” and the result of their joint labours was “The Clandestine Marriage” (1766), a play now wholly neglected, but worthy of revival as much on the stage as in the study.