an this be?" I thought. "_Quite_ this thing has never come to me
before! _This is different!_ It has never been quite the same before."

It was never to be quite the same again.

Elation, triumph, being lifted on high by a single stroke of the mighty
wing of glory--call it by any name, think of it as you like--it was as
Portia that I had my first and last sense of it. And, while it made me
happy, it made me miserable because I foresaw, as plainly as my own
success, another's failure.

Charles Coghlan, an actor whose previous record was fine enough to
justify his engagement as Shylock, showed that night the fatal quality
of _indecision_.

A worse performance than his, carried through with decision and attack,
might have succeeded, but Coghlan's Shylock was not even bad. It was
_nothing_.

You could hardly hear a word he said. He spoke as though he had a sponge
in his mouth, and moved as if paralyzed. The perspiration poured down
his face; yet what he was doing no one could guess. It was a case of
moral cowardice rather than incompetency. At rehearsals no one had
entirely believed in him, and this, instead of stinging him into a
resolution to triumph, had made him take fright and run away.

People felt that they were witnessing a great play with a great part cut
out, and "The Merchant of Venice" ran for three weeks!

It was a pity, if only because a more gorgeous and complete little
spectacle had never been seen on the English stage. Veronese's "Marriage
in Cana" had inspired many of the stage pictures, and the expenditure in
carrying them out had been lavish.

In the casket scene I wore a dress like almond-blossom. I was very thin,
but Portia and all the ideal _young_ heroines of Shakespeare ought to
be thin. Fat is fatal to ideality!

I played the part more stiffly and more slowly at the Prince of Wales's
than I did in later years. I moved and spoke slowly. The clothes seemed
to demand it, and the setting of the play developed the Italian feeling
in it, and let the English Elizabethan side take care of itself. The
silver casket scene with the Prince of Aragon was preserved, and so was
the last act, which had hitherto been cut out in nearly all stage
versions.

I have tried five or six different ways of treating Portia, but the way
I think best is not the one which finds the heartiest response from my
audiences. Has there ever been a dramatist, I wonder, whose parts admit
of as many different interpretations