We players know quite well and accept with philosophy the fact that when we have done we are forgotten.  We are sometimes told that we live too much in the public eye and enjoy too much public favor and attention; but at least we make up for it by leaving no trace of our short and merry reign behind us when it is over!

I have never, even in Paris, seen anything more admirable than the ensemble of the Bancroft productions.  Every part in the domestic comedies, the presentation of which, up to 1875, they had made their policy, was played with such point and finish that the more rough, uneven, and emotional acting of the present day has not produced anything so good in the same line.  The Prince of Wales’s Theater was the most fashionable in London, and there seemed no reason why the triumph of Robertson should not go on for ever.

But that’s the strange thing about theatrical success.  However great, it is limited in its force and duration, as we found out at the Lyceum twenty years later.  It was not only because the Bancrofts were ambitious that they determined on a Shakespearean revival in 1875:  they felt that you can give the public too much even of a good thing, and thought that a complete change might bring their theater new popularity as well as new honor.

I, however, thought little of this at the time.  After my return to the stage in “The Wandering Heir” and my tour with Charles Reade, my interest in the theater again declined.  It has always been my fate or my nature—­perhaps they are really the same thing—­to be very happy or very miserable.  At this time I was very miserable.  I was worried to death by domestic troubles and financial difficulties.  The house in which I first lived in London, after I left Hertfordshire, had been dismantled of some of its most beautiful treasures by the brokers.  Pressure was being put on me by well-meaning friends to leave this house and make a great change in my life.  Everything was at its darkest when Mrs. Bancroft came to call on me and offered me the part of Portia in “The Merchant of Venice.”

I had, of course, known her before, in the way that all people in the theater seem to know each other, and I had seen her act; but on this day, when she came to me as a kind of messenger of Fate, the harbinger of the true dawn of my success, she should have had for me some special and extraordinary significance.  I could invest that interview now with many dramatic features, but my memory, either because it is bad or because it is good, corrects my imagination.

“May I come in?”

An ordinary remark, truly, to stick in one’s head for thirty-odd years!  But it was made in such a very pretty voice—­one of the most silvery voices I have ever heard from any woman except the late Queen Victoria, whose voice was like a silver stream flowing over golden stones.

The smart little figure—­Mrs. Bancroft was, above all things, petite—­dressed in black—­elegant Parisian black—­came into a room which had been almost completely stripped of furniture.  The floor was covered with Japanese matting, and at one end was a cast of the Venus of Milo, almost the same colossal size as the original.