“For years I went home to my little room, if, fortunately, I had one,’ he said, ’and perhaps a tallow dip was stuck in the neck of a bottle, and I was fortunate if I had something to cook for myself over a fire, if I had a fire.  That was my life.  When night came I wandered about the streets of London, and if I had a penny I invested it in a baked potato from the baked-potato man on the corner.  I would put these hot potatoes in my pockets, and after I had warmed my hands, I would swallow the potato.  That is the truth.’

“At length, his wardrobe became so reduced that attendance at any but the most informal entertainments became out of the question, and finally he had to give up these.  Soon he was inking the seams of his coat, and wandered about shunning friends, for fear they would learn to what a condition he was reduced.

“‘Often,’ he admitted, ’I stayed in bed and slept because when I was awake I was hungry.  Footsore, I would gaze into the windows of restaurants, bakeries, and fruit shops, thinking the food displayed in them the most tempting and beautiful sight in the world.  There were times when I literally dined on sights and smells,’

“He did every species of dramatic and musical hack work in drawing rooms, in clubs, and in special performances in theatres.  Sometimes he got into an obscure provincial company, but he said that his very cleverness was a kind of curse, since the harder he worked and the better the audiences liked him, the quicker he was discharged.  The established favorites of these little companies always struck when a newcomer made a hit.

“Richard Barker was the stage manager and Mansfield could never please him.  After trying again and again, he once cried:  ’Please, Barker, do let me alone.  I shall be all right.  I have acted the part.’  ‘Not you,’ declared Barker.  ’Act?  You act, man?  You will never act as long as you live!’

“The recollection of the rebuffs, poverty, starvation, inability to find sympathy, because, possibly, of the pride which repelled it, the ill-fortune which snatched the extended opportunity just as he was about to grasp it, the jealousy of established favorites of the encroaching popularity of newcomers, the hardships of provincial travel and life in a part of the country and at a time when the play-actor was still regarded as a kind of vagabond and was paid as such, the severity of the discipline he encountered from the despots over him—­all painted pictures on his memory and fed a fire under the furnace of his nature which tempered the steel in his composition to inflexibility.  The stern rod of discipline was held over him every moment and often fell with unforgetable severity.  He was trained by autocrats in a school of experience more autocratic than anything known to the younger actors of this generation.