She was still playing principal boy in the pantomime--a gay, gallant
Prince, in plumed cap and tights. But I declined. Another of the great
comic singers of my childhood--a man--I met on a Margate steamboat. He
told me of the lost glories of the ancient days _quorum pars magna fuit_,
and of the after-histories of his great rivals. One, I recollect, had
retired with a fortune, opened a magnificent Temperance Hotel at the
seaside, and then broken his neck by falling down his own splendid
staircase, drunk. "Ah," said the veteran, sighing at an overcrowded
profession, "there were only two or three comic singers in those days."
"There are only two or three now," quoth I. And the old man beamed.
Another ancient hero of the halls, long since translated to the theatres,
whom I first saw at a music-hall in St. Giles', buttonholed me the other
night in St. James', in the halls of a Duchess: a curious meeting. That I
should have ever reverenced him seemed as strange as that there should be
still people to reverence the coronet of the Duchess. Yes, it is very far
off, that magic time when the world was full of splendid things and
splendid men and women, a great Fair, and I, like the child in Henley's
poem, wandered about, enjoying, desiring, possessing.
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