through any number of acts, remembering everything by patting his
forehead with the flat of his hand, jerking out sentences by shaking
himself, and piling them up in pyramids over his head with his right
forefinger. And they have a generic small comedy-piece, where you see
two sofas and three little tables, to which a man enters with his hat
on, to talk to another man--and in respect of which you know exactly
when he will get up from one sofa to sit on the other, and take his hat
off one table to put it upon the other--which strikes one quite as
ludicrously as a good farce.[199]. . . There seems to be a good piece at
the Vaudeville, on the idea of the _Town and Country Mouse_. It is too
respectable and inoffensive for me to-night, but I hope to see it before
I leave . . . I have a horrible idea of making friends with Franconi, and
sauntering when I am at work into their sawdust green-room."

At a theatre of a yet heavier school than the Francais he had a drearier
experience. "On Wednesday we went to the Odeon to see a new piece, in
four acts and in verse, called _Michel Cervantes_. I suppose such an
infernal dose of ditch water never was concocted. But there were certain
passages, describing the suppression of public opinion in Madrid, which
were received with a shout of savage application to France that made one
stare again! And once more, here again, at every pause, steady, compact,
regular as military drums, the Ca Ira!" On another night, even at the
Porte St. Martin, drawn there doubtless by the attraction of repulsion,
he supped full with the horrors of classicality at a performance of
_Orestes_ versified by Alexandre Dumas. "Nothing have I ever seen so
weighty and so ridiculous. If I had not already learnt to tremble at the
sight of classic drapery on the human form, I should have plumbed the
utmost depths of terrified boredom in this achievement. The chorus is
not preserved otherwise than that bits of it are taken out for
characters to speak. It is really so bad as to be almost good. Some of
the Frenchified classical anguish struck me as so unspeakably ridiculous
that it puts me on the broad grin as I write."

At the same theatre, in the early spring, he had a somewhat livelier
entertainment. "I was at the Porte St. Martin last night, where there is
a rather good melodrama called _Sang Mele_, in which one of the
characters is an English Lord--Lord William Falkland--who is called
throughout the piece Milor William