at
followed. His liking for this Fund was the fact of its not confining its
benefits to any special or exclusive body of actors, but opening them
generously to all; and he gave a description of the kind of actor, going
down to the infinitesimally small, not omitted from such kind help,
which had a half-pathetic humour in it that makes it charming still. "In
our Fund," he said, "the word exclusiveness is not known. We include
every actor, whether he be Hamlet or Benedict: the ghost, the bandit, or
the court physician; or, in his one person, the whole king's army. He
may do the light business, or the heavy, or the comic, or the eccentric.
He may be the captain who courts the young lady, whose uncle still
unaccountably persists in dressing himself in a costume one hundred
years older than his time. Or he may be the young lady's brother in the
white gloves and inexpressibles, whose duty in the family appears to be
to listen to the female members of it whenever they sing, and to shake
hands with everybody between all the verses. Or he may be the baron who
gives the fete, and who sits uneasily on the sofa under a canopy with
the baroness while the fete is going on. Or he may be the peasant at the
fete who comes on the stage to swell the drinking chorus, and who, it
may be observed, always turns his glass upside down before he begins to
drink out of it. Or he may be the clown who takes away the doorstep of
the house where the evening party is going on. Or he may be the
gentleman who issues out of the house on the false alarm, and is
precipitated into the area. Or, if an actress, she may be the fairy who
resides for ever in a revolving star with an occasional visit to a bower
or a palace. Or again, if an actor, he may be the armed head of the
witch's cauldron; or even that extraordinary witch, concerning whom I
have observed in country places, that he is much less like the notion
formed from the description of Hopkins than the Malcolm or Donalbain of
the previous scenes. This society, in short, says, 'Be you what you may,
be you actor or actress, be your path in your profession never so high
or never so low, never so haughty or never so humble, we offer you the
means of doing good to yourselves, and of doing good to your brethren.'"

Half an hour before he rose to speak I had been called out of the room.
It was the servant from Devonshire-terrace to tell me his child Dora was
suddenly dead. She had not been strong from her birth