s to proclaim him
a sharer in the secret with his audience."

"Wherein does the superiority lie?" wrote another critic in comparing
our productions with those which had been seen in America up to 1884.
"Not in the amount of money expended, but in the amount of brains;--in
the artistic intelligence and careful and earnest pains with which every
detail is studied and worked out. Nor is there any reason why Mr. Irving
or any other foreigner should have a monopoly of either intelligence or
pains. They are common property, and one man's money can buy them as
well as another's. The defect in the American manager's policy
heretofore has been that he has squandered his money upon high salaries
for a few of his actors and costly, because unintelligent, expenditure
for mere dazzle and show."

William Winter soon became a great personal friend of ours, and visited
us in England. He was one of the few _sad_ people I met in America. He
could have sat upon the ground and told "sad stories of the deaths of
kings" with the best. He was very familiar with the poetry of the
_immediate_ past--Cowper, Coleridge, Gray, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats,
and the rest. He _liked_ us, so everything we did was right to him. He
could not help being guided entirely by his feelings. If he disliked a
thing, he had no use for it. Some men can say, "I hate this play, but
of its kind it is admirable." Willie Winter could never take that
unemotional point of view. In England he loved going to see graveyards,
and knew where every poet was buried.

His children came to stay with me in London. When we were all coming
home from the theater one night after "Faust" (the year must have been
1886) I said to little Willie:

"Well, what do you think of the play?"

"Oh my!" said he, "it takes the cake."

"Takes the _cake_!" said his little sister scornfully, "it takes the
ice-cream!"

"Won't you give me a kiss?" said Henry to the same young miss one night.
"No, I _won't_ with all that blue stuff on your face." (He was made up
for Mephistopheles.) Then, after a pause, "But why--why don't you _take_
it!" She was only five years old at the time!

I love the American papers, especially the Sunday ones, although they do
weigh nearly half a ton! As for the interviewers, I never cease to
marvel at their cleverness. I tell them nothing, and the next day I read
their "story" and find that I have said the most brilliant things! The
following delightful "skit" on one of