expected; and I was
surprised to find that when the piece was read to the assembled company
it was received with considerable misgiving as to its chance of success.

CHAPTER XXI.

It is very curious that their experience tells so little among
theatrical people in their calculation of the probable success of a new
piece; perhaps it may be said that they cannot positively foresee the
effect each actor or actress may produce with certain parts; but given
the best possible representation of the piece, the precise temper of the
particular audience who decides its fate on the first night of
representation is always an unknown quantity in the calculation, and no
technical experience ever seems to arrive at anything like even
approximate certainty with regard to that. I felt perfectly sure of the
success of "The Hunchback," but I think that was precisely because of my
want of theatrical experience, which left me rather in the position of
one of the public than one of the players, and there was much grave
head-shaking over it, especially on the part of our excellent
stage-manager, Mr. Bartley, who was exceedingly faint-hearted about the
experiment.

My father, with great professional disinterestedness, took the
insignificant part of the insignificant lover, and Knowles himself
filled that of the hero of the piece, the hunchback; a circumstance
which gave the part a peculiar interest, and compensated in some measure
for the loss of the great genius of Kean, for whom it had been written.

The same species of uncertainty which I have said characterizes the
judgments of actors with regard to the success of new pieces sometimes
affects the appreciation authors themselves form of the relative merits
of their own works, inducing them to value more highly some which they
esteem their best, and to which that pre-eminence is denied by popular
verdict. Knowles, while writing "The Hunchback," was so absorbed with
the idea of what Kean's impersonation of it would probably be, that he
was entirely unconscious of what the great actor himself probably
perceived, that on the stage the part of Julia would overweigh and
eclipse that of Master Walter. Knowles felt sure he had written a fine
man's part, and was really not aware that the woman's part was still
finer. What is yet more singular is that while he was writing "The
Wife," which he did immediately afterward, with a view to my acting the
principal female character, he constantly