’O limed soul, that, struggling to be free,
     Art more engaged!’

However, ‘sudden the worst turns best to the brave,’ and ’there is much music’ in this old fellow if only you have the humanity to listen.

To begin with, he has probably a distinguished face, with a bunch of vigorous curly hair, white as hawthorn.  He has a manner, too.  Suppose you try and enter into his soul for a moment.  It does us good to get outside ourselves for a while, and this old man’s soul is a palace of memory.  Those lines that, may be, have been familiar to you for sixteen years, have been familiar to him for sixty.  That is why he knows them off so well, why he repeats them under his breath—­Look at his face!—­like a Methodist praying, anticipating the actor in all the fine speeches.  Do look at his face!  How it shines, as the golden passages come treading along.  How his head moves in an ecstasy of remembrance, in which there is a whole world of tears.  How he half turns to you with a wistful appeal to feel what he is feeling:  an appeal that might kindle a clod.  It is the old wine laughing to itself within the old bottle.

And, one thing you will notice, it is the poetry that moves him:  the great metaphor, the sonorous cadence, the honeysuckle fancy.  He belongs to an age that had an instinct for beauty, and loved style—­an age that, in the words of a modern wit, had not grown all nose with intellect, an age that went to the theatre to dream, not to dissect.

For you there may be here and there a flower of remembrance stuck within the leaves of the play, but for him it is stained through with the sweets of sixty springs.  His youth lies buried within it like a thousand violets.

Practically he is Death at the play.  To you there is but one ghost in Hamlet, to him there are fifty, and they all dance like shadows behind ‘the new Hamlet,’ and even sit about the stalls.

If your love be with you, forbear to press her hand in the love-scenes, or, at least, don’t let the old man see you:  because he used to punctuate those very passages he is muttering in just the same way—­sixty years ago, when she whose angel face he will kiss no more, unless it be in the heavenly fields, sat like a flower at his side.  Poor old fellow, can you be selfish to him?  Can you say, ‘These tedious old fools!’ Fool thyself, this night shall thy youth be required of thee.

You might think of this next time you drop across the old playgoer.  It was natural in Hamlet to swear at Polonius—­who, you will remember, was an old playgoer himself—­but, being a gentleman, it was natural in him, too, to recall the first player with, ’Follow that lord; but look you mock him not!’

THE MEASURE OF A MAN