“The Hunchback,” according to my confident expectation, succeeded.  Knowles played his own hero with great force and spirit, though he was in such a state of wild excitement that I expected to see him fly on the stage whenever he should have been off it, and vice versa, and followed him about behind the scenes endeavoring to keep him in his right mind with regard to his exits and his entrances, and receiving from him explosive Irish benedictions in return for my warnings and promptings.  Throughout the whole first representation I was really as nervous for and about him as I was about the play itself and my own particular part in it.  My father did the impossible with Sir Thomas Clifford, in making him both dignified and interesting; and Miss Taylor was capital in the saucy Helen.  My part played itself and was greatly liked by the audience; the piece was one of the most popular original plays of my time, and has continued a favorite alike with the public and the players.  The part of the heroine is one, indeed, in which it would be almost impossible to fail; and every Julia may reckon upon the sympathy of her audience, the character is so pre-eminently effective and dramatic.

Of the play as a composition not much is to be said; it has little poetical or literary merit, and even the plot is so confused and obscure that nobody to my knowledge (not even the author himself, of whom I once asked an explanation of it) was ever able to make it out or give a plausible account of it.  The characters are inconsistent and wanting in verisimilitude to a degree that ought to prove fatal to them with any tolerably reasonable spectators; in spite of all which the play is interesting, exciting, affecting, and humorous.  The powerfully dramatic effect of the situations, and the two characters of Master Walter and Julia, the great scope for good acting in all the scenes in which they appear, the natural fire, passion, and pathos of the dialogue, in short the great merits of the piece as an acting play cover all its defects; even the heroine’s vulgar, flighty folly and the hero’s absurd eccentricity interfering wonderfully little with the sympathy of the audience for their troubles and their final triumph over them.  “The Hunchback” is a very satisfactory play to see, but let nobody who has seen it well acted attempt to read it in cold blood!

It had an immense run, and afforded me an opportunity of testing the difference between an infinite repetition of the text of Shakespeare and that of any other writer.  I played Juliet upward of a hundred nights without any change of part and did not weary of it; Julia, in “The Hunchback,” after half the repetition became so tiresome to me that I would have given anything to have changed parts with my sprightly Helen, if only for a night, to refresh myself and recover a little from the extreme weariness I felt in constantly repeating Julia.  The audience certainly would have suffered by the exchange, for Miss Taylor would not have played