ature took a late
revenge, I left a sick-room at Newcastle-on-Tyne; and every ache and
pain fell away, and the sick treble changed to a healthy baritone, and
manly strength came to pluck the halting pace of the invalid to marching
time, and a feebly intermittent pulse grew full and calm at the splendid
all-compelling influence of the stage. Had it been a cold lecture, now,
or a speech on politics--and no man loves that kind of exercise more
than I--the armchair and the warm fireside had not reached to me and
beamed on me in vain. But the stage? That was another matter altogether.
It is a better stimulant than the society of old friends. It is a finer
anodyne than tobacco. It is a quicker and more constant pick-me-up than
champagne. Sternest duty and purest pleasure wear one smiling face. And
to think that I was well into the forties before I guessed this splendid
truth!

But Nature is compensatory in everything, and her balance works in this
accessible fairyland as elsewhere. The stage is the natural home of
petty _contretemps_. When a man has dared to play in a piece of his own
writing in a city like London it would be absurd to affect modesty or
a want of belief in his own power to please. If under such conditions
a man had no such faith, he would be an ass beyond the reach of satire.
What else but faith in himself should bring him there? 'Que diable
faisait-il dans _cette_ galere?' Yet the bold amateur intruding is
conscious of a resemblance in himself to the demons mentioned in Holy
Writ He believes (in himself), but he trembles.

The night of the tentative production of 'Ned's Chum' at the Globe
Theatre was the brightest in my earthly calendar. Yet as I waited for
my first cue an irresistible, horrible cold nausea got hold of me, and
I had to fly back to my dressing-room and to endure on dry land all
the agonies of _mal de mer_. The call-boy's warning cry slew one keen
anguish with another, and the wretch who had been physically sick with
fear a minute before was, under fire, as cool as a cucumber. But there
came one moment more of heroic trial before the play was over. I keep
religiously the notices of that first night, and I have laughed more
than once at the gentle trouncing I got at the hands of Mr. William
Archer in the columns of the _World_. My critic complained, tenderly
enough, that at one point I took the stage with an obvious effort, as if
determined to show that thus and thus should a man behave under