c
Shakespearean student, and all agreed that in entertaining Mary Anderson
they had "entertained an angel unawares."

The California trip may be said to close the first period of Mary
Anderson's dramatic career. With some draw-backs and some rebuffs she had
made a great success, but she was known thus far only as a Western girl,
who had yet to encounter the judgment of the more critical audiences of
the South and East, as years later, with a reputation second to none all
over the States as well as in Canada, she essayed, with a success which
has been seldom equaled, perhaps never surpassed, the ordeal of facing, at
the Lyceum, an audience, perhaps the most fastidious and critical in
London.

CHAPTER IV.

THE CAREER OF AN AMERICAN STAR.

Mary Anderson returned home from California disheartened and dispirited.
To her it had proved anything but a Golden State. Her visit there was the
first serious rebuff in her brief dramatic career whose opening months had
been so full of promise, and even of triumph. She was barely seventeen,
and a spirit less brave, or less confident in its own powers, might easily
have succumbed beneath the storm of adverse criticism. Happily for
herself, and happily too for the stage on both sides of the Atlantic, the
young _debutante_ took the lesson wisely to heart. She saw that the
heights of dramatic fame could not be taken by storm; that her past
successes, if brilliant, regard being had to her youth and want of
training, were far from secure. She was like some fair flower which had
sprung up warmed by the genial sunshine, likely enough to wither and die
before the first keen blast. Her youth, her beauty, her undoubted dramatic
genius, were points strongly in her favor; but these could ill
counterbalance, at first at any rate, the want of systematic training, the
almost total absence of any experience of the representation by others of
the parts which she sought to make her own. She had seen Charlotte
Cushman; indeed, in "Meg Merrilies," but of the true rendering of a part
so difficult and complex as Shakespeare's Juliet, she knew absolutely
nothing but what she had been taught by the promptings of her own artistic
instinct. She was herself the only Juliet, as she was the only Bianca, and
the only Evadne, she had ever seen upon any stage. In those days she had,
perhaps, never heard the remark of Mademoiselle Mars, who was the most
charming of Juliets at sixty. "Si j'avais ma jeunesse,