off to Lady Bancroft's in
Berkeley Square to leave some flowers. Outside the house, the cabman
told my daughter that in old days he had often driven Charles Kean from
the Princess's Theater, and that sometimes the little Miss Terrys were
put inside the cab too and given a lift! My daughter thought it such an
extraordinary coincidence that the old man should have come to the
stage-door of Drury Lane by a mere chance on my jubilee day that she
took his address, and I was to send him a photograph and remuneration.
But I promptly lost the address, and was never able to trace the old
man.

APOLOGIA

I have now nearly finished the history of my fifty years upon the stage.

A good deal has been left out through want of skill in selection. Some
things have been included which perhaps it would have been wiser to
omit.

I have tried my best to tell "all things faithfully," and it is possible
that I have given offense where offense was not dreamed of; that some
people will think that I should not have said this, while others,
approving of "this," will be quite certain that I ought not to have said
"that."

"One said it thundered ... another that an angel spake."

It's the point of view, for I have "set down naught in malice."

During my struggles with my refractory, fragmentary, and unsatisfactory
memories, I have realized that life itself is a point of view: is, to
put it more clearly, imagination.

So if any one said to me at this point in my story: "And is this, then,
what you call your life?" I should not resent the question one little
bit.

"We have heard," continues my imaginary and disappointed interlocutor,
"a great deal about your life in the theater. You have told us of plays
and parts and rehearsals, of actors good and bad, of critics and of
playwrights, of success and failure, but after all, your whole life has
not been lived in the theater. Have you nothing to tell us about your
different homes, your family life, your social diversions, your friends
and acquaintances? During your life there have been great changes in
manners and customs; political parties have altered; a great Queen has
died; your country has been engaged in two or three serious wars. Did
all these things make no impression on you? Can you tell us nothing of
your life in the world?"

And I have to answer that I have lived very little in the world. After
all, the life of an actress belongs to the theater as the life of a
soldier b