knowledge.  He was the most consummate public performer I ever saw, and it was an incomparable pleasure to hear him lecture; on the platform he was the great and finished actor which he probably would not have been on the stage.  He was fond of private theatricals, and liked to play in them with his children and their friends, in dramatizations of such stories of his as ’The Prince and the Pauper;’ but I never saw him in any of these scenes.  When he read his manuscript to you, it was with a thorough, however involuntary, recognition of its dramatic qualities; he held that an actor added fully half to the character the author created.  With my own hurried and half-hearted reading of passages which I wished to try on him from unprinted chapters (say, out of ‘The Undiscovered Country’ or ’A Modern Instance’) he said frankly that my reading could spoil anything.  He was realistic, but he was essentially histrionic, and he was rightly so.  What we have strongly conceived we ought to make others strongly imagine, and we ought to use every genuine art to that end.

XIV.

There came a time when the lecturing which had been the joy of his prime became his loathing, loathing unutterable, and when he renounced it with indescribable violence.  Yet he was always hankering for those fleshpots whose savor lingered on his palate and filled his nostrils after his withdrawal from the platform.  The Authors’ Readings when they had won their brief popularity abounded in suggestion for him.  Reading from one’s book was not so bad as giving a lecture written for a lecture’s purpose, and he was willing at last to compromise.  He had a magnificent scheme for touring the country with Aldrich and Mr. G. W. Cable and myself, in a private car, with a cook of our own, and every facility for living on the fat of the land.  We should read only four times a week, in an entertainment that should not last more than an hour and a half.  He would be the impresario, and would guarantee us others at least seventy-five dollars a day, and pay every expense of the enterprise, which he provisionally called the Circus, himself.  But Aldrich and I were now no longer in those earlier thirties when we so cheerfully imagined ‘Memorable Murders’ for subscription publication; we both abhorred public appearances, and, at any rate, I was going to Europe for a year.  So the plan fell through except as regarded Mr. Cable, who, in his way, was as fine a performer as Clemens, and could both read and sing the matter of his books.  On a far less stupendous scale they two made the rounds of the great lecturing circuit together.  But I believe a famous lecture-manager had charge of them and travelled with them.