on that portion of the
memoir; and the accident gives it now a more appropriate place. For,
though the facts related belong to the interval described in the chapter
on his school-days and start in life, when he had to pass nearly two
years as a reporter for one of the offices in Doctors' Commons, the
influences and character it illustrates had their strongest expression
at this later time. I had asked him, after his return to Genoa, whether
he continued to think that we should have the play; and this was his
reply. It will startle and interest the reader, and I must confess that
it took myself by surprise; for I did not thus early know the story of
his boyish years, and I thought it strange that he could have concealed
from me so much.

"ARE we to have that play??? Have I spoken of it, ever since I came home
from London, as a settled thing! I do not know if I have ever told you
seriously, but I have often thought, that I should certainly have been
as successful on the boards as I have been between them. I assure you,
when I was on the stage at Montreal (not having played for years) I was
as much astonished at the reality and ease, to myself, of what I did as
if I had been another man. See how oddly things come about! When I was
about twenty, and knew three or four successive years of Mathews's At
Homes from sitting in the pit to hear them, I wrote to Bartley who was
stage manager at Covent-garden, and told him how young I was, and
exactly what I thought I could do; and that I believed I had a strong
perception of character and oddity, and a natural power of reproducing
in my own person what I observed in others. There must have been
something in the letter that struck the authorities, for Bartley wrote
to me, almost immediately, to say that they were busy getting up the
_Hunchback_ (so they were!) but that they would communicate with me
again, in a fortnight. Punctual to the time, another letter came: with
an appointment to do anything of Mathews's I pleased, before him and
Charles Kemble, on a certain day at the theatre. My sister Fanny was in
the secret, and was to go with me to play the songs. I was laid up, when
the day came, with a terrible bad cold and an inflammation of the face;
the beginning, by the bye, of that annoyance in one ear to which I am
subject at this day. I wrote to say so, and added that I would resume my
application next season. I made a great splash in the gallery soon
afterwards; the _Chronicle