he considered worth seeing at the London theatres.  I believe he used to reproach himself—­unfairly, I think—­with spending too much time on such recreations.  For a man who worked so hard and so incessantly as he did; for a man to whom vacations meant rather a variation of mental employment than absolute rest of mind, the drama afforded just the sort of relief that was wanted.  His vivid imagination, the very earnestness and intensity of his character enabled him to throw himself utterly into the spirit of what he saw upon the stage, and to forget in it all the petty worries and disappointments of life.  The old adage says that a man cannot burn the candle at both ends; like most proverbs, it is only partially true, for often the hardest worker is the man who enters with most zest into his recreations, and this was emphatically the case with Mr. Dodgson.

Walter Pater, in his book on the Renaissance, says (I quote from rough notes only), “A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated dramatic life.  How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses?  How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?  To burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.”  Here we have the truer philosophy, here we have the secret of Lewis Carroll’s life.  He never wasted time on social formalities; he refused to fulfil any of those (so called) duties which involve ineffable boredom, and so his mind was always fresh and ready.  He said in one of his letters that he hoped that in the next world all knowledge would not be given to us suddenly, but that we should gradually grow wiser, for the acquiring knowledge was to him the real pleasure.  What is this but a paraphrase of another of Pater’s thoughts, “Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself is the end.”

And so, times without number, he allowed himself to be carried away by emotion as he saw life in the mirror of the stage; but, best of all, he loved to see the acting of children, and he generally gave copies of his books to any of the little performers who specially pleased him.  On January 13, 1877, he wrote in his Diary:—­

Went up to town for the day, and took E—­ with me to the afternoon pantomime at the Adelphi, “Goody Two-Shoes,” acted entirely by children.  It was a really charming performance.  Little Bertie Coote, aged ten, was clown—­a wonderfully clever little fellow; and Carrie Coote, about eight, was Columbine, a very pretty graceful little thing.  In a few years’ time she will be just the child to act “Alice,” if it is ever dramatised.  The harlequin was a little girl named Gilchrist, one of the most beautiful children, in face and figure, that I have ever seen.  I must get an opportunity of photographing her.  Little Bertie Coote, singing “Hot Codlings,” was curiously like the pictures of Grimaldi.

It need hardly be said that the little girl was Miss Constance Gilchrist.  Mr. Dodgson sent her a copy of “Alice in Wonderland,” with a set of verses on her name.