It is very curious that their experience tells so little among theatrical people in their calculation of the probable success of a new piece; perhaps it may be said that they cannot positively foresee the effect each actor or actress may produce with certain parts; but given the best possible representation of the piece, the precise temper of the particular audience who decides its fate on the first night of representation is always an unknown quantity in the calculation, and no technical experience ever seems to arrive at anything like even approximate certainty with regard to that.  I felt perfectly sure of the success of “The Hunchback,” but I think that was precisely because of my want of theatrical experience, which left me rather in the position of one of the public than one of the players, and there was much grave head-shaking over it, especially on the part of our excellent stage-manager, Mr. Bartley, who was exceedingly faint-hearted about the experiment.

My father, with great professional disinterestedness, took the insignificant part of the insignificant lover, and Knowles himself filled that of the hero of the piece, the hunchback; a circumstance which gave the part a peculiar interest, and compensated in some measure for the loss of the great genius of Kean, for whom it had been written.

The same species of uncertainty which I have said characterizes the judgments of actors with regard to the success of new pieces sometimes affects the appreciation authors themselves form of the relative merits of their own works, inducing them to value more highly some which they esteem their best, and to which that pre-eminence is denied by popular verdict.  Knowles, while writing “The Hunchback,” was so absorbed with the idea of what Kean’s impersonation of it would probably be, that he was entirely unconscious of what the great actor himself probably perceived, that on the stage the part of Julia would overweigh and eclipse that of Master Walter.  Knowles felt sure he had written a fine man’s part, and was really not aware that the woman’s part was still finer.  What is yet more singular is that while he was writing “The Wife,” which he did immediately afterward, with a view to my acting the principal female character, he constantly said to me, “I am writing such a part for you!” and had no notion that the only part capable of any effect at all in the piece was that of Julian St. Pierre, the good-for-nothing brother of the duchess.

The play of “The Wife” was singularly wanting in interest, and except in the character of St. Pierre was ineffective and flat from beginning to end, in that respect a perfect contrast to “The Hunchback,” in which the interest is vivid and strong, and never flags from the first scene to the last.  I was quite unable to make anything at all of the part of Marianna, nor have I ever heard of its becoming prominent or striking in the hands of any one else.