"THE GREAT LAFAYETTE."

Auckland Star, Volume XLII, Issue 149, 24 June 1911, Page 13

"THE GREAT LAFAYETTE."

A MISSION OF LOVE. NEW COOKERY METHOD. (From Our Special Correspondent) LONDOX, May 12. A REAL SHOWMAN.

In Lafayette, burned in the terrible Edinburgh musical hall fire, the world loses a prince of jugglers and a king among showmen. In few people, except the late Mr. Earnum, has the showman genius burned more brightly than in Lafayette. Like Barnum he came from America, and like Barnum he grasped every opportunity for engaging and holding public attention. His first appearance in England took place in 1890, when he came from Chicago with no particular reputation and a sca-nty repertoire of tricks which probably kept him in bread and butter and little else. He was, however, a great worker, with a keen eye for every means of advertisement and advancement in his professaon. To this rather than to any marvellous adroitness, he owed the position he finally attained on the variety stage, a position which enabled him to make London contracts for £400 or £500 a week, and to mufct suburban and provincial theatre managers in £250 to £300 a week. His income past few years could not have fallen short of £20,000 per annum, for he was engaged practically for every week of the year, it is said, had at the time of his death contracts in existence which would have kept him busy till the end of 1916. Clever as he undoubtedly was, Lafayette is not ranked among the great illusionists, by those who "know the ropes." His methods were never simple; he sought to bewilder you first that he mdght astound you afterwards. A favourite practice was to change places with another at the proper moment to reveal himself suddenly as a supposed woman, statue, or animal. Those used to such devices could often see through the whole thing. But Lafayette ap:pealed to the multitude, and nobody has ;ever taken the measure of the multitude more accurately. His apparatus was most elaborate; for each of the six persons that appeared on the stage there were ten behind the scenes helping to work the wonders. It was as a showman that Lafayette stood unrivalled. 'Hi* personal skill is. the many arts he

professed was limited, but he had a perfect genius for annexing ideas and elaborating and improving them out of all recognition. His shows were more or less all "bluff." They were made up of illusions to be obtained from any good conjuring store, sleight of hand tricks which owed less to the skill of the performer than to clever mechanical devices, "quick changes" worked by the aid of a "double." But Lafayette used even the stalest devices with consummate cleverness. He never let a trrek stand on its own legs, but welded a host of them into a picturesque mass, and presented them to his audiences one after the other so quickly that the majority of those who went to see his shows came away with the odea that they had had "the last word" in illusion and conjuring. Without doubt, however, he was the most brilliant showman and the finest self-advertiser of his day on the variety stage.

■while in a prominent place in the car was a silver-plated , figure of Venus, with a silver-plated statuette of "Beauty" crouching at her feet.

The dog was to have been buried at Piershill Cemetery, Edinburgh, in a special vault which Lafayette had had constructed there at a cost of £200. This was lined "with white enamelled tiles, and on the top was a marble slab with the inscription, "Dedicated bo the memory of my darling 'Beauty.'" Th cemetery authorities demurred to the buriaj of a dog in consecrated ground, but this objection Lafayette met by declaring that his own ashes would be placed there after cremation, and he proposed to have the dog buried with 'him—a pathetic prophecy.