TOM TAYLOR AND LAVENDER SWEEP

I have read in some of the biographies of me that have been published
from time to time, that I was chagrined at Coghlan's fiasco because it
brought my success as Portia so soon to an end. As a matter of fact, I
never thought about it. I was just sorry for clever Coghlan, who was
deeply hurt and took his defeat hardly and moodily. He wiped out the
public recollection of it to a great extent by his Evelyn in "Money,"
Sir Charles Pomander in "Masks and Faces," and Claude Melnotte in "The
Lady of Lyons," which he played with me at the Princess's Theater for
one night only in the August following the withdrawal of "The Merchant
of Venice."

I have been credited with great generosity for appearing in that single
performance of "The Lady of Lyons." It was said that I wanted to help
Coghlan reinstate himself, and so on. Very likely there was some such
feeling in the matter, but there was also a good part and good
remuneration! I remember that I played Lytton's proud heroine better
then than I did at the Lyceum five years later, and Coghlan was more
successful as Melnotte than Henry Irving. But I was never really _good_.
I tried in vain to have sympathy with a lady who was addressed as
"haughty cousin," yet whose very pride had so much inconsistency. How
could any woman fall in love with a cad like Melnotte? I used to ask
myself despairingly. The very fact that I tried to understand Pauline
was against me. There is only one way to play her, and to be bothered by
questions of sincerity and consistency means that you will miss that way
for a certainty!

I missed it, and fell between two stools. Finding that it was useless
to depend upon feeling, I groped after the definite rules which had
always governed the delivery of Pauline's fustian, and the fate that
commonly overtakes those who try to put old wine into new bottles
overtook me.

I knew for instance, exactly how the following speech ought to be done,
but I never could do it. It occurs in the fourth act, where Beauseant,
after Pauline has been disillusioned, thinks it will be an easy matter
to induce the proud beauty to fly with him:

"Go! (_White to the lips._) Sir, leave this house! It is humble;
but a husband's roof, however lowly, is, in the eyes of God and
man, the temple of a wife's honor. (_Tumultuous applause._) Know
that I would rather starve--aye, _starve_--with him who has
betrayed me than accept _yo