number of the actor-manager's friends came on the stage at the Haymarket Theatre after his first appearance in that difficult rôle and Tree asked Gilbert frankly how he liked his impersonation of the melancholy Dane. Gilbert with a look of ingenuous innocence replied: "My dear fellow, I never saw anything so funny in my life, and yet it was not in the least vulgar." In further conversation Gilbert contributed his bit to the solution of the Shakespearean enigma by saying: Hamlet, you know, was a man idiotically sane, with lucid intervals of lunacy." During this tour I was interested in making a translation of "Falstaff" which should if possible better that of Beatty Kingston, parts of which he had acknowledged to me not to be to his satisfaction. Knowing my Shakespeare well I made memoranda throughout the vocal score for lines which, in the event of my ever performing it in English, could be used by myself at least, adapting from other plays of Shakespeare such actual phrases as fitted Verdi's notes. It has unfortunately never fallen to my lot to sing the opera in English, but the version follows which I have used on countless occasions in my concerts when rendering the delightful song in which the fat Knight endeavors to commend his vast bulk to his ladylove by telling her how thin and slender he used to be when he was young; thus When I was page in the old Duke's house, I was a vision supple and tender, Slim enough to slip through the eye of a needle, I was a vision supple and tender, When I was page to the old Duke's Grace, Rewarded my service and homage with many Then was I courted, favored by the fair, When I was page so comely and tender, etc. Our tour took us to the principal cities of England, Scotland, and Ireland. It was while in the capital where "old Scotia's grandeur springs" that an Italian soprano and I visited the ancient cathedral of St. Giles. Under a bleak and lowering sky in a Scotch mist we came upon the gray and forbidding-looking edifice, and the child of the sunny south asked me, with a real desire to be informed on so grave a subject, "Do they have the same God here that we do in Italy?" Our journey over, I resumed my concerts, singing that autumn selection from "The Mastersingers" and "The Valkyrie" with the best of all Wagnerian interpreters, Hans Richter, with whom it was my privilege to work many a time afterward, deriving the greatest benefit from association with him. Taking it all in all, and looking back upon a long line of orchestral conductors, I consider him to be the chiefest of them all. It is much to be regretted that he never came to America, for Richter said he would come if Joachim came; and Joachim said he would attempt the journey if Richter did, but as a matter of fact neither of them wanted to cross the ocean, even to visit the New World. Deeply impressed as are all these experiences upon my memory, nothing can ever obliterate from it Tristan's death scene, when for the first time I played Kurwenal with Max Alvary. I seemed not only to be living the character, but to be dying it no less. After my fashion of merging myself in my part I seemed then, as always since, actually to be the old servitor dying by the side of his friend for whom he had fought, like some faithful dog kissing the hand of his master as the last act of a devoted life. During the season of 1894 I sang for the first time in Berlioz's "Damnation of Faust" as Mephistopheles, a part in which on many subsequent occasions I reveled, and was also concerned with Arnold Dolmetsch, the expert in old instruments, in the revival of the comedy by Bach called "The Peasant's (Bauern) Cantata," which was given at Staple Inn in the very room where it had been performed nearly a century and a half before and with instruments of the kind actually then in use. Saint-Saëns' beautiful opera, "Samson and Delilah," was another work new to me which I performed with Santley soon after. It is a great favorite upon the English concert platform, offering fine opportunities for both principals and chorus, yet it may not be heard as an opera by reason of the existence of a law forbidding the stage presentation of any scriptural episodes. Still within my recollection Massenet's " Hérodiade" has been performed at Covent Garden, but under another title and with the familiar biblical names duly changed. So goes on the merry game of "beating the devil about the bush." CHAPTER XVIII ARTS AND LETTERS The very knowledge of many arts, however we may follow another, helps to equip us for our own.- Tacitus. I LIVED for ten years at No. 19, Kensington Gore, close by the Royal Albert Hall and opposite Kensington Palace Gardens. In that little house I entertained many a celebrity of the day, with many evidences of the friendship of persons in the musical, artistic, and literary worlds. The great painters, Watts, Millais, Leighton, Poynter, Alma-Tadema, Dicksee, Burne-Jones, were my friends, with the Americans, Whistler and John S. Sargent. Sargent was not only fond of music, but played the piano remarkably well, and I often sang to his admirable accompaniments. One Sunday he and I were bicycling to a luncheon party at the house of Madame Liza Lehmann, a few miles out of town, when it came on to rain, leaving the roads so slippery that our wheels skidded and threw both the painter and me into the mud and water at the roadside. We picked ourselves out in a dreadful mess, arriving at our destination in such a state of unsightliness that we had to be supplied with fresh clothing. Madame Lehmann's husband, Herbert Bedford, was of middle height and slender, Sargent was tall and stout, I was short and thick; and the effects of the borrowed clothing were ridiculous. Sargent put his host's trousers on wrong side before and concealed the open deficiency with a frock coat, while I had to turn up both |