Nearly opposite the old Gaiety Theatre in the Strand stood the offices of Gaze and Co., the tourists’ agents. And in the early seventies the upper part of the premises had been let to a retired old sea-dog of portly person and convivial habits called Captain Harris. This gentleman had made a somewhat extensive acquaintance among the lesser lights of the stage, the music-hall, and the newspaper world, and he had taken the upper part of the Gaze office with the view of turning it into a Bohemian club.

For a while the institution flourished greatly. It was named the Savoy Club—on the lucus a non lucendo principle—and by those who had not been chosen for membership it was nicknamed “the Saveloy.” A continuous conviviality was the dominant note of the establishment. The hours kept by the members were astounding. The pace, in a word, was too fast. And in a couple of years the Savoy closed its doors, the unfortunate mariner who founded it having lost in the venture the savings of a lifetime.

It was at the Savoy that I first met John Hollingshead. After the closing of his theatre he would drop in of a night, generally accompanied by one or two members of the Gaiety company. No man ever undertook the management of a playhouse with less practical knowledge of the stage than Hollingshead; no man ever conducted a theatre more successfully, and to no man is the public more indebted for the amelioration of the condition of that portion of it which patronizes the drama. Hollingshead was a man of sound common-sense, never hide-bound by tradition, and always possessing the courage of his opinions. These were the characteristics which he brought to bear on the unknown enterprise of theatrical management. And so considerable was the success attending the application of his principles to the unfamiliar task which he had undertaken, that in the course of a few years he became known all over “the profession” by the sobriquet of “Practical John.”

It is true that after a successful managerial career lasting over many years his luck deserted him, and his theatre fell into other hands, but the period of undimmed success during which he kept burning that which he called “the sacred lamp of burlesque” was one upon which he might look back with considerable satisfaction. He was in many directions a reformer. He abolished the programme fee. He refused to sublet his cloak-rooms to the harpies who at that time held an undisputed monopoly for at once incommoding and fleecing the playgoers who booked for the stalls and boxes. He was the first man in London who installed the electric light. He did not, indeed, use it as an illuminant inside his theatre—electric lighting was in its infancy, and had not as yet been tried as an indoor illuminant—but he burned a fierce, if blinking, electric globe over the main entrance to the Gaiety, and he should have the obituary honours due to the pioneer.

Gradually I became on intimate terms with Hollingshead, and remained a friend of his until his lamented death. Some millions—I am speaking by the card—had passed through his hands to actors, authors, musicians, and the rest of the vast army required to carry on the business of a successful theatre. Yet he died in somewhat straitened circumstances. His courage and his equable temper, however, did not desert him. He was a bit of a fatalist, I fancy. He spoke jauntily of being “equal to either fortune.” Originally he had been on the Press. He was one of the staff of Charles Dickens on Household Words and All the Year Round. He wrote for Thackeray on the Cornhill, and for Norman Macleod on Good Words. Indeed, in the sixties his work was in general demand by the magazine editors. The daily paper with which he was most intimately associated was the Daily News, for which his particular friend Moy Thomas was dramatic critic. When he severed his connection with journalism, he characteristically observed that a journalist is like a barrel-organ—wound up to play so many tunes, and that when he has “run down” it is time for him to retire. Which, I may parenthetically mention, would have been a sad doctrine for some of us.

No figure was more familiar in the Strand, Garrick Street, and the West End than that of Hollingshead in the halcyon days of the Gaiety. His good looks, his neat attire, his silvery hair, his hat cocked a trifle on one side, his brisk walk, his cheery expression, and his generally debonair appearance, suggested even to the outsider the busy, competent, yet good-natured, man of affairs. He was an excellent talker, very fond of paradox. A utilitarian philosopher, he was a follower of Jeremy Bentham. It was difficult to gather from his views as given in conversation what his political convictions really were. I once asked him the question. He readily replied in that curious but modulated falsetto of his. “I’m a Tory Socialist,” was his answer.

The stalls of the Gaiety—more particularly the front row of the stalls—were filled with the jeunesse dorÉe of the period. These young gentlemen were each interested in the career of one of the shapely vestals who tended Hollingshead’s “sacred lamp.” A somewhat lavish display of figure was then de rigueur with the chorus ladies. It had not yet become the fashion for young men to marry into the chorus—so to say; but the young swells made other arrangements which—in those days—the chorus lady regarded as eminently satisfactory. So the fortunes of the chorus ebbed and flowed. I have called at the ineligible rooms of a chorus lady while she was lunching on fried liver and bacon; her hair was in curling-pins, and her principal article of attire was a far from cleanly peignoir. She has called me by endearing terms, and there was nothing in the world she would not surrender to me in return for a newspaper notice a line long. In a week’s time I have seen the same young woman drive up to the Gaiety in her own victoria, loaded with jewels, dressed in a Parisian inspiration, and with a crop of golden hair which spoke volumes for the prolific nature of the foreign soil in which it grew. Her attitude toward myself had changed as perceptibly as had her coiffure, “Hello, old chappie!” she has cried, with an amusing affectation of high-bred hauteur.

The swagger stallites who had organized themselves into a beauty cult at the Gaiety displayed every variety of what Tennyson called “the gilded forehead of the fool.” These young gentlemen were known as “mashers” (the object of their temporary devotions was known as a “mash”); as “Johnnies” and as “members of the Crutch and Toothpick Brigade.” In this race for the overrated favours of the chorus lady they were often beaten by the elderly “masher”—the fatuous old rouÉ of the wig, the stays, the pigments, and the unguents. In these, as in all other civil contracts, it is money that matters, after all.

If Hollingshead played burlesque as his trump card, it must be recalled, in justice to his memory, that he instituted the matinÉe in London; and that he instituted it, not as the vehicle for amateur authors who played with problems, and called the result “problem plays,” but as the means of introducing to the London public (or re-introducing) the greatest living exponents of the highest examples of dramatic literature. He brought over from Paris the entire company of the House of MoliÈre. He engaged Charles Mathews to play in a series of his memorable and delightful performances. And if I don’t mistake, he gave that veteran actor the opportunity of enacting a new part in a new-play, “My Awful Dad.” He afforded us the opportunity of seeing Phelps in his rendering of Sir Pertinax MacSycophant in Macklin’s “Man of the World,” probably the finest all-round bit of acting I have even been privileged to witness.

Knowing “Practical John,” I soon came to know the members of his company, the bright, particular star of which was Miss Nellie Farren. Miss Farren was the embodiment of the very spirit of burlesque. She was fun personified. And although she had the support always of a distinguished company—it included such men as Toole, Edward Terry, Royce, and John MacLean, and such women as Constance Loseby and Kate Vaughan—the whole weight of the production seemed to fall on Nellie Farren’s shoulders, and she lifted it how, and where, and when she pleased. Off the stage Miss Farren was quite as amusing as on. She had the rare gift of spontaneous humour, a fine flow of animal spirits, an unfailing good temper, the whole shot through with a certain indefinable Cockney quality which gave to everything she said its hall-mark. I do not think I ever spent more enjoyable afternoons than on those Sundays when Miss Farren was at home to her friends at Sunbury. She had bought two cottages near the gates of Kempton Park, and had them knocked into one. And here, on Sundays, the merry little chÂtelaine received her friends. And some very jovial gatherings we had on those Sunbury sabbaths. The outstanding characteristic of the average actress when off the stage is an obvious artificiality. The charm of the Farren’s society was in her frank naturalness, her ingenuous honesty.

Nellie Farren was the wife of Robert Soutar, the stage-manager of the Gaiety, a comic actor of limited range, and the author of some popular farces. An extremely convivial soul when off the stage, he was regarded as a martinet while on it, and during the entire period of his stage-management hardly a day passed without a rehearsal being called on some pretence or another. For this reason he was highly disapproved of by the chorus, toward the members of which his sentiments were sometimes conveyed with brutal directness. “It’s the only sort of language they understand,” he once said to me. Perhaps he was right, although the polished shafts of Byron’s irony often went home quite as surely. I have known a girl at rehearsal burst into tears under the suavely-spoken sarcasm of Byron, and I once received a letter of complaint from a member of a chorus illustrating one of his burlesques, in which the talented author of “Our Boys” was described as “a nasty, sneerin’ beest.”

The inauguration of the old Gaiety and the passing of it, roughly speaking, cover the period of my own experience of the London stage and its interesting entourage, which must be my excuse for according to my memories of the Gaiety what may seem to be an undue space.

If anyone were to ask me who, in my experience, was the most mirth-provoking actor I had ever seen, I should, without the least hesitation, mention a name which is quite unknown to the playgoers of this generation, and is being rapidly forgotten by those who belong to the last. And the name that I should mention would be that of John Sleeper Clarke. The house at which he originally appeared was the little Strand Theatre, merrily associated with the burlesques of the Broughs and Byron, and subsequently with the less artless productions of H. B. Farnie, in which so much laughter was made for the public by Marius and Edward Terry, and that plump, inimitable Angelina Claude. J. S. Clarke was an American, and, although he appeared with great success in some of our dramatic masterpieces—he was the finest Bob Acres and the best Dr. Pangloss of his day—he preferred to enact characters written for him in pieces of which he held the copyright.

Clarke’s favourite characters were Major Wellington De Boots and Toodles. It is always a hopeless task to attempt to convey to those who have not witnessed it the effect of a comic performance on the observer. It would not be correct to describe Clarke as an “eccentric” actor. His thoroughly artistic and masterly impersonation of Bob Acres and Dr. Pangloss quite forbid any hasty generalization of the kind. It would be more just to say that he selected eccentric characters for representation, and in the illustration of these characters he employed for all they were worth certain quaint methods of voice, expression, gesture, and gait which were quite his own. The pieces in which he introduced himself as an irresponsible eccentric were as a rule flimsy compositions, entirely negligible from a literary and dramatic point of view. But in the mouth of Clarke the inanities of the dramatist became precious gems. He would utter an author’s commonplace with such an air of comic gravity—if I may use the expression—with such an inimitable facial note of enjoyment in the delivery, that the little house in the Strand would rock with laughter over sayings which in cold print would appear to be the veriest drivel.

There must be many men about town who retain a vivid recollection of Clarke’s acting. They will bear me out as to the statement just made. They will remember how their sides shook as Clarke in “De Boots” made the entirely empty declaration: “My dear Felix, I call you Felix because you are my best friend!” What an extraordinary quality of irresistible humour he imparted to that absurdly puerile line! Again, what a weight and world of dramatic humour he imposed on the trifling sentence addressed to the pump in “Toodles”! The scene is one in which he depicts a man imperfectly sober. Stumbling about a yard, he knocks against the pump. He grasps the handle, snakes it heartily up and down, exclaiming the while, “Excuse me, my friend—er—will you take anything?” Banal to a degree, I quite admit. But Lord! how often have I roared over the words, and to how many of my own day who read this page do they not recall an ineffaceable and delightful recollection—an they would but acknowledge it.

I hate to apply the money test as a standard by which to measure the value of artistic work. In many instances it is no test at all. The artistic charlatan sometimes amasses a fortune. But this does not hold so literally with the actor who has to appeal in person to patrons drawn from all classes of society. In his case the making of a fortune must surely be a reliable test of the possession of the real sort of genius. Clarke in a very few years in London made a fortune, purchased the lease of the Haymarket, and retired from his profession into private life without any formal leave-taking. Years after I first roared over his impersonations, I was introduced to him in a little hotel in one of the streets—Surrey Street, or another—close to the old Strand Theatre. Here the merry-maker was in the habit of sitting alone. He was the most moody, melancholy, shy, and reticent person with whom I had up to that time become acquainted. There was no slightest trace of the spontaneous, irrepressible, and irresistible fun which seemed to possess him when he made his welcome entrances on the stage. I met him many times afterwards. I made a point of meeting him. The desire to understand the problem presented obsessed me. But I found him always the same—polite in a grave way, willing to converse to the extent of answering a question or passing a shy opinion when it was challenged. But he made no jokes, told no anecdotes, indulged in no reminiscence. Others who knew him told me the same tale of him. In the roaring Strand John Sleeper Clarke was as much a recluse as though he lived in a hut in the depths of a forest.

Reticence is not usually the characteristic note of the actor. Of all the companionships that I formed during my Press experiences, none were so enjoyable as those I made on the stage. There are, of course, some pompous asses among them. But you will find these in all callings. And the pompous mummer was never the most successful one. As a rule, the more distinguished and gifted the actor, the more genial and accessible he is. The players are full of amusing early experiences, which they relate with delightful candour. Actors’ stories are, as a rule, well told, and are worth telling. Nor is this extraordinary. Making points off the stage should be very good practice for making points on it. There were two classes of raconteur in my day. The one was the reminiscent or quasi-historical man; the other was the simple retailer of good stories. Of the former class the two finest examples were John Ryder and John Coleman. Of the latter were Lionel Brough and Arthur Williams. I should not have used the past tense in alluding to Arthur Williams, who, I am happy to know, is alive and well, and still entertaining a public in whose smiles he has basked for many years.

My first introduction to Lionel Brough—“Lal,” as he was always affectionately called—was at Covent Garden, where he was stage-manager during the career of that costly experiment “Babil and Bijou.” The late Lord Londesborough was a determined supporter of the stage, a great friend of actors—and actresses—and a generous contributor to theatrical charities. His lordship financed the Covent Garden Opera House when it was taken by Miss Fowler. Boucicault did the play—a sort of pantomime, we should call it to-day—with processions, and ballets, and comic relief, and popular songs, and all the rest of it. There was an army of Amazons, headed by the statuesque Helen Barry, who had started her artistic career in a cigar-shop in Piccadilly. The armour of these ladies cost no end of money, being very beautiful and substantial. A few weeks since I met a manager—a provincial manager—in the North who informed me that some of the properties and armour made for “Babil and Bijou” were being taken round the country by fifth-rate travelling companies to this day.

But to get back to “Lal” and his stories. The majority of these were, I have every reason to believe, “made up” by Brough. Everything was in the telling. One of them occurs to me now. A certain young married couple had been rendered very unhappy by the betting habits of the husband. They had an only boy of some seven summers. They were in debt all over the place. The servant had been discharged. There was little food in the house. At this tragic juncture a cheque for forty pounds arrived. The relieved and delighted husband embraced his wife and hurried off to the city to “melt” the cheque, promising to return immediately, settle all outstanding accounts, and take the family out to dinner. There was racing at Kempton that day, and the unfortunate man knew of one or two “certs.” So when he had received the proceeds of the cheque, he ran down to Kempton Park, fired with the benevolent idea of doubling, or even quadrupling, his forty pounds. The usual thing happened. Far from winning, he dropped every sou, and returned home a sad, despairing man. He hoped for sympathy from his wife; but, for the first time in their married existence, the wife rose to the occasion, and, in unmistakable terms, denounced her stricken and shamefaced spouse. He slunk from the room, and silently closed the door behind him. She heard him mount the stairs. But her heart was hardened against him. Ten minutes after the exit of the gambler her little golden-haired blue-eyed boy dashed into the room.“Oh, mummy!” he cried, in his eager, happy way, “daddy’s cut hisself shavin’.”

“H-h-h-has he cut himself much?” asked the woman, rising.

“Cut hisself much!” exclaimed the innocent child; “he’s cut his bally head off!”

Brough used to tell another story in which the same note of exaggeration was the salient characteristic. It had to do with a Scotsman and a kilt, and afforded a sort of current phrase in his clubs for a time. The quoted phrase was: “I’m a maun o’ few wor-r-r-ds!” The story is not of the kind that can easily be conveyed in cold print.

Some years before his death I went into the Eccentric Club with him. There had been a considerable making of theatrical knights at or about the time; and when we entered the club-room, we found a smart young journalist of the new school inveighing against the knighting of stage folk. Brough, who did not care a red cent one way or the other, but who felt himself bound to stick up for his order, asked:

“But why should not actors be made knights?”

“Because,” answered the adolescent Fleet Streeter, with professional glibness, “they belong to a wandering, a nomadic, race.”

“Sort of Arabian knights, I suppose,” suggested Brough, closing the discussion with the acquiescent ridicule that kills.

“Lal” Brough and John L. Toole were the especial favourites of Londesborough among the players, and they might frequently be seen on his drag—his lordship was an accomplished “whip”—driving down to race-meetings near London, or enjoying in his company the beauties of Scarborough.

Another indomitable patron of the stage in the seventies and eighties was the Duke of Beaufort. His Grace was particularly quick in discovering budding talent in pretty actresses. To his fostering care was due the great advance which Miss Connie Gilchrist made in an education outside the meagre accomplishments demanded in an actress of burlesque—an education which fitted her for taking that high place in Society which she was destined to fill. Ah, dear me! it seems but a little while ago since the Duke was giving those luncheons in the upper room at Rule’s in Maiden Lane, at which the time passed for all of us so quickly and so gaily. Yet how few of those who sat at the board have survived to tell the tale!

In a public-house kept by one Beck in that part of the Strand which backed on to Holywell Street, and has disappeared under the advance of the County Council improvements, there was established a small club of actors and journalists, called the Unity Club. This was a coterie to which admission was not quite so easy as its surroundings might suggest. The talk there was excellent because, I think, there were always a sufficient number of butts upon which to exercise the ingenuity of the wits. It was in this select assembly that George R. Sims was first enabled to give a taste of his quality. His butt-in-ordinary was a very boastful actor named Harcourt, and the verses—chiefly in parody of great poets—which Sims wrote on one of Harcourt’s big boasts will still be recalled by those who were privileged to read one of the few copies printed. The “house-dinner” at the Unity Club was one of the most enjoyable feasts to which I ever sat down. The fare, indeed, was plain and substantial, but the sauce provided by the cheery players and pressmen who sat round the table was the most piquant to be obtained in all London.

At the Unity might sometimes be met David James and Tom Thorne, of the Strand Theatre. The club was just opposite to the theatre. When James and Thorne left the Strand, and, in partnership with Harry Montague, took the Vaudeville, a great amount of public interest was displayed in the venture. The new managers relied on burlesque as an opening experiment, preceded by comedy. The comedy was provided by Andrew Halliday. I forget who wrote the burlesque—Byron, perhaps. But the fortunes of the managers were to be founded by the new work of a new man, and the two burlesque actors from the House of Swanborough were to be enabled to rely thereafter on comedy, and to dispense entirely with burlesque. The new author was James Albery; the new play, “Two Roses.” For this production the services of Henry Irving were engaged—an engagement which evinced considerable managerial discretion, and, incidentally, gave Irving his first real opportunity of making a hit with the London public. All the members of the managerial triumvirate were provided with strong parts. George Honey gave a memorable impersonation of a good-hearted bagman—the “Our Mr. Jenkins” of the bills. Some of his lines were delivered with great unction. He comes under the influence of his wife’s religious belief, and evolves into what he calls “a shining light.” He and his wife are encountered by the heroine of the play.

“How do you do, Mr. Jenkins—or perhaps I should ask, how do you shine?”

“With the mild effulgence of the glow-worm,” is the answer of Our Mr. Jenkins.

“We are all worms,” interpolates his wife.

“Yes, my dear; but we don’t all glow,” was the answer, given by Honey with a half-deprecatory, half exultant expression that was simply inimitable and delightful.

But the Digby Grand of Irving was, after all said and done, the gem of the production. In all his after-life he never surpassed it. Only once did he equal it. I have seen Irving in every impersonation he gave in London, and I shall always hold that he reached high-water mark with the selfish swell of “Two Roses,” and that he touched that mark for the second time with Matthias in “The Bells.”

Albery’s “Two Roses” was succeeded by a comedy from the same author called “Apple-Blossoms.” It was not a success. Nor, indeed, did Albery ever produce another play to equal his first. I came to know him well; collaborated with him in a small way; and visited him when he was living at Evans’s Hotel, and after he had furnished some pleasant chambers in Southampton Street, Bloomsbury. He was an admirable talker, a splendid listener, and possessed a pretty turn for unexpected epigram. The Suffragette existed in those remote days. But she practised under another name. And the questions of Woman’s Rights and Female Emancipation were argued as warmly then as now. The subject came up on one occasion at Albery’s rooms. His visitors were taking sides. One strong believer in tradition took his stand on Genesis, and asserted woman’s inferiority on Scriptural grounds.

“Woman was made out of the rib of Man,” he declared.

“And was thus a mere side-issue of creation,” suggested Albery.

Albery ended sadly. He became addicted to a habit which ruined a good many of the best fellows of a convivial period. His great gifts were wasted entirely in conversational sallies, and among boon companions at the Savage Club and other Bohemian resorts. He had married a lady who subsequently “went on the stage,” and greatly succeeded in her vocation, becoming one of the most popular actresses of her time and of our own. A story of the days of Albery’s decadence has come to me. Some time before his lamented death, and in a contrite mood, he called his wife to his bedside, and said:

“Ah, my dear, you should have married a different man!”

“I did, Jim,” was the tearful reply.

And there, I think, we plumb the very deeps of pathos.

It would be, however, an endless, exhausting, and uninteresting task to pursue my friends the players through their various theatres. The easier way is to catch them during their hours of relaxation in their clubs and in their pubs. The billiard-room of the Junior Garrick between half-past eleven at night and two in the morning was a covert always successfully drawn by those in search of theatrical game. Pool and pyramids were the games most in vogue, but more especially pool. Here you were sure of encountering “Jimmy” Fernandez (I never knew an actor, however sedate and inaccessible, who, being christened “James,” was not called “Jimmy” by his confrÈres), a devoted exponent with the cue; H. B. Farnie was rarely absent. He was a great hulking Scotsman with a slight limp, of which he hated to be reminded. He had originally been a medical student at Edinburgh. John Clarke, of the Adelphi—no relation to John Sleeper Clarke—was another of this coterie. He was a fine comic and character actor. He was the husband of Miss Furtado, a favourite Adelphi actress of the time. He played with unvarying success under many managements, including that of the Bancrofts, was of a grumbling disposition, and was known as Lame Clarke, to distinguish him from the other John Clarke—Sleeper of that ilk—lower down the Strand.

Clarence Holt, the tragedian, greatly fancied himself at the game of billiards, and had succeeded in cutting more billiard-cloths than any man living. Clarence Holt (his real name was Jo) was a barn-stormer of the old school; and although in general conversation he scowled, and made use of weird expletives, he was as good-hearted a fellow as ever lived. At the Saturday house-dinners of the club he invariably gave a recitation of “The Old Clock on the Stairs,” and always accepted with a sort of condescending and regal dignity the ironical cheers which it invariably evoked. His mingling of oaths with endearing epithets was one of the quaintest things in the world.

“How is Miss Holt?” one would ask.

“Oh, the dear, darling, bally little idiot—she’s well, dear boy, well!”

James and Thorne were also habituÉs of the billiard-room of the “J.G.,” as it was affectionately called by its members. And, indeed, in the stifling atmosphere of that room, which was situated in the upper part of the house, you would meet from time to time one half the actors in town. It was the favourite resort of the Swanboroughs, and of many others whose names have escaped my memory. In the Savage Club there was no billiard-room, but there was always a good attendance of actors after the closing of the theatres. The Garrick itself was never an actors’ club in the exclusive sense of the word. One or two of the upper crust of the “profession” always belong to it, to justify and perpetuate the use of the title. But to the rank and file of the calling it stands in the relation of Paradise to the Peri. So that, beyond the Junior Garrick and the Savage, the noble army of actors had no clubs. Their usual meeting-places, therefore, became pubs. And these seemed to be selected with a view to obtaining the utmost discomfort conceivable combined with the highest scale of charges possible. Thus, in the seventies the chief meeting-place of the theatrical fraternity was a wine-bar in Russell Street, Covent Garden, next door to the “Hummums,” and occupying a site now covered by a market tavern. From one to four o’clock of an afternoon the wine-bar at Rockley’s was crammed with all sorts and conditions of stage folk, and their contributory artistic aids—managers, costumiers, authors, artists, journalists.

About half a dozen times in my life did I visit Rockley’s, but I retain the most vivid recollection of the close atmosphere, the mingled smell of sawdust and port, the loud buzz of conversation, and the frequent laugh that followed the last new story or the smartly uttered retort. It will suffice here to record the impression of a single visit. The little man standing close to the bar, the centre of an eager group intent on his poignant utterance, is Shiel Barry. Barry was an Irishman, an actor of extraordinary intensity, and a man of considerable general knowledge. He was an omnivorous reader, and, when I first knew him, a great admirer of Carlyle, some passages of whose “French Revolution” he recited with a wonderfully lurid effect. I have recorded elsewhere in this book my impression of his masterly interpretation of the part of the miser in “Les Cloches de Corneville.” His rendering of certain of the characters in Dion Boucicault’s Irish plays was equally memorable and impressive. He was a master of pathos and ferocity, and could at once attract or repel by the strange realism of his embodiment of either emotion. The flamboyant gentleman with the Louis-Napoleonic moustache is William Holland, of the Surrey Theatre, the North Woolwich Gardens, the Circus at Covent Garden, and finally manager of the Corporation’s amusements at Blackpool, which became this particular Napoleon’s St. Helena. Conversing with him is Dr. Joseph Pope, familiarly known as “Jo,” and nicknamed “Jope.” Dr. Pope had been a surgeon in the army, serving in the Royal Artillery. He was a brother of Mr. Sam Pope, Q.C., of the Parliamentary Bar. Jo had been celebrated as the fattest man in the army, and Sam was distinguished as the fattest man at the Bar. Sam was a bachelor making an enormous income. Jo was a bachelor living on his half-pay; and it used to be said, that when Jo was in need of a remittance wherewithal to set right his balance at Cox’s, he would apply to Sam. If Sam proved irresponsive, Jo at once threatened to go on to the music-hall stage. That always “fetched” Sam, who hated the Bohemianism in which Jo wallowed.

William Brunton discusses costume designs with Alias, and Harry S. Leigh hums a new lyric which he has composed for a production at the Alhambra. Brunton, espying me, edges through the crowd to me.

“Have you heard George Hodder’s non sequitur?” he asks.

“No. What was it?”

“George was sent down to Stony Stratford by the Daily News. When he woke up in the morning, he had forgotten the name of the place. He rang the bell, and desired the chambermaid to send ‘boots’ to him. When that menial appeared, George asked: ‘Wh-wh-what’s the n-name of this p-place?’ ‘Stony Stratford,’ answered ‘boots.’ ‘Ah!’ said Hodder, ‘you may well c-call it Stony Stratford—for I never was so b-b-bitten with bugs in the whole course of my l-l-life!”

Rockley’s was at best a cramped and pestiferous inferno, ill ventilated, and without a chair to sit down on. But its customers made long stays, notwithstanding, and I understood that a considerable amount of theatrical business was done on the premises. It was a sort of rialto of the “profession.” From Rockley’s, the actor and those who do business with him migrated to the new Gaiety bar opened in the Strand. This was a horseshoe-shaped bar next door to the theatre, much patronized by the Brothers Mansell, by Henry Herman, by the then unknown D’Oyly Carte, by several of the Nationalist Members of Parliament, and by many of the shapely members of the chorus from burlesque theatres in the immediate vicinity. It was leased by one “Bill” Bayliss, who in after-years, and during the Beaufort period, conducted Rule’s, in Maiden Lane. For some years the Gaiety bar remained a great afternoon centre for the actors—particularly those who happened to be out of an engagement and to retain an expensive thirst. During a Gaiety entr’acte I have smoked a cigarette in the place, but regret that I have had no great personal acquaintance with it. Its history for ten or twelve years from its opening would be well worth writing by a man possessing the requisite qualifications.

It was the last public-house meeting-place of stage people. There are clubs now to suit every grade of actor. And chorus girls are no more seen in bars. They affect the swagger restaurants—and I, for one, cannot blame them. A greater propriety in attire is observed by the actor of to-day. He no longer affects a Quartier Latin Bohemianism. He takes himself quite seriously as a social unit. And with reason. For just as every citizen of the United States is a possible President, so is every actor a possible Knight, and every actress a possible “my lady.”

To record the number of my theatrical acquaintances, and my recollections, pleasant and unpleasant, of our forgathering, would fill many chapters. The foregoing stray notes on my friends the players are remarkable for the omission of many names which I recall with the most lively sentiments of gratitude for many a dull hour enlivened, and for many a joyous moment heightened and prolonged.