"What can rob us of this joy! The bookseller will not buy, the public will not read. Let them sleep at the foot of the ladder of the angels--we climb it all the same. And then one settles down into such good-tempered Lucianic contempt for men. One wants so little from them, when one knows what one's self is worth, and what they are. They are just worth the coin one can extract from them in order to live. Our life--_that_ is worth so much to us. And then their joys, so vulgar to them, we can make them golden and kingly. Do you suppose Burns drinking at the ale-house, with his boors around him, was drinking, like them, only beer and whisky? No, he was drinking nectar--he was imbibing his own ambrosial thoughts--shaking with the laughter of the gods. The coarse human liquid was just needed to unlock his spirit from the clay--take it from jerkin and corduroys, and wrap it in the 'singing-robes' that floated wide in the skies: the beer or the whisky was needed but for that, and then it changed at once into the drink of Hebe. But come, you have not known this life--you have not seen it. Come, give me this night. I have moneys about me--I will fling them abroad as liberally as Alexander himself, when he left to his share but hope. Come!"
"To my throne. On that throne last sate Edmund Kean--mighty mime. I am his successor. We will see whether in truth these wild sons of genius, who are cited but 'to point a moral and adorn a tale,' were objects of compassion. Sober-suited cits to lament over a Savage and a Morland--a Porson and a Burns!--"
"Or a Chatterton," said Leonard, gloomily.
"Chatterton was an impostor in all things; he feigned excesses that he never knew. _He_ a bacchanalian--a royster! He!--No. We will talk of him. Come!"
The Room! And the smoke-reek, and the gas-glare of it. The whitewash of the walls, and the prints thereon of the actors in their mime-robes, and stage postures; actors as far back as their own lost Augustan era, when the stage was a real living influence on the manners and the age. There was Betterton in wig and gown--as Cato, moralising on the soul's eternity, and halting between Plato and the dagger. There was Woodward as "The Fine Gentleman," with the inimitable rakehell air in which the heroes of Wycherly and Congreve and Farquhar live again. There was jovial Quin as Falstaff, with round buckler and "fair round belly." There was Colley Cibber in brocade--taking snuff as with "his Lord," the thumb and forefinger raised in air--and looking at you for applause. There was Macklin as Shylock, with knife in hand; and Kemble, in the solemn weeds of the Dane; and Kean in the place of honor over the chimneypiece.