Consider the
preparation of the brain for that memory. What! I should actually go to a
play--that far-off wonder! "The Miller and his Men" cut in cardboard
should no longer stave off my longing for the living passion of the
theatre. 'T was a very elongated young man who took me, a young
cigar-maker fond of reciting, spouting Shakespeare from a sixpenny
edition, playing Hamlet mentally as he rolled the tobacco-leaf. There was
a halo about his head, for he was on speaking terms with the low comedian
of the "Brit.," and, I understood, was permitted upon occasion to pay for
a pint of half-and-half. Alas! all this did not avail to save him from an
early tomb. Poor worshipper of the green room, perchance thy ghost still
walks there. Or is there room in some other world for thy baffled
aspirations?
In such clouds of glory did the drama first come to me, sulphurously
splendid. In the "Brit." I made my first acquaintance with the limelit
humanity that, magnificent in its crimes and in its virtues, sins or
suffers in false eyebrows or white muslin to the sound of soft music.
Here I met that strange creation, the villain--a being as mythic,
meseems, as the centaur, and, like it, more beast than man. The "Brit."
was a hot place for villains, the gallery accepting none but the highest
principles of speech and conduct, and ginger-beer were not too weighty a
form of expressing detestation of the more comprehensive breaches of the
decalogue.
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