Every one seemed to
be delighted. The old Duke of Cambridge patted, or rather _thumped_, me
on the shoulder and said kindly: "Ah, my dear, _you_ can act!" Henry
quite effaced me in his wonderful sketch of Napoleon. "It seems to me
some nights," I wrote in my diary at the time, "as if I were watching
Napoleon trying to imitate H.I., and I find myself immensely interested
and amused in the watchings."
"The Medicine Man" was, in my opinion, our only _quite_ unworthy
production.
_From my Diary._--"Poor Taber has such an awful part in the play,
and mine is even worse. It is short enough, yet I feel I can't cut
too much of it.... The gem of the whole play is my hair! Not waved
at all, and very filmy and pale. Henry, I admit, is splendid; but
oh, it is all such rubbish!... If 'Manfred' and a few such plays
are to succeed this, I simply must do something else."
But I did not! I stayed on, as every one knows, when the Lyceum as a
personal enterprise of Henry's was no more--when the farcical Lyceum
Syndicate took over the theater. I played a wretched part in
"Robespierre," and refused L12,000 to go to America with Henry in
"Dante."
In these days Henry was a changed man. He became more republican and
less despotic as a producer.
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