I was rebuked by the permanent inhabitants for being kind
to a little boy in professionally ragged clothing who made me, as he has
made hundreds of others, listen to a long, made-up history of
Stratford-on-Avon, Shakespeare, the Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar
and other things--the most hopeless mix! The inhabitants assured me that
the boy was a little rascal, who begged and extorted money from visitors
by worrying them with his recitation until they paid him to leave them
alone.

Long before I knew that the child was such a reprobate I had given him a
pass to the gallery and a Temple Shakespeare! I derived such pleasure
from his version of the "Mercy" speech from "The Merchant of Venice"
that I still think he was ill-paid!

"The quality of mercy is not strange
It droppeth as _the_ gentle rain from 'Eaven
Upon _the_ place beneath; it is twicet bless.
It blesseth in that gives and in that takes
It is in the mightiest--in the mightiest
It becomes the throned monuk better than its crownd.

It's an appribute to God inself
It is in the thorny 'earts of kings
But not in the fit and dread of kings."

I asked the boy what he meant to be when he was a man. He answered with
decision: "A reciterer."

I also asked him what he liked best in the play ("Henry VIII.").

"When the blind went up and down and you smiled," he replied--surely a
naive compliment to my way of "taking a call"! Further pressed, he
volunteered: "When you lay on the bed and died to please the angels."

XIV

LAST DAYS AT THE LYCEUM

I had exactly ten years more with Henry Irving after "Henry VIII."
During that time we did "King Lear," "Becket," "King Arthur,"
"Cymbeline," "Madame Sans-Gene," "Peter the Great" and "The Medicine
Man." I feel too near to these productions to write about them. The
first night of "Cymbeline" I felt almost dead. Nothing seemed right.
"Everything is so slow, so slow," I wrote in my diary. "I don't feel a
bit inspired, only dull and hide-bound." Yet Imogen was, I think, the
_only_ inspired performance of these later years. On the first night of
"Sans-Gene" I acted _courageously_ and fairly well. Every one seemed to
be delighted. The old Duke of Cambridge patted, or rather _thumped_, me
on the shoulder and said kindly: "Ah, my dear, _you_ can act!" Henry
quite effaced me in his wonderful sketch of Napoleon. "It seems to me
some nights," I wrote in my diary at the time, "as if I wer