THE DRAMA 181 



read so far, and flung it on the floor. ' No,' 

 he cried, * that won't do. You were thinking of 

 yourself, not of Salvini ! ' The criticism was 

 shrewd as usual, but it was unfair through ignor- 

 ance ; it was not of myself that I was thinking, 

 but of the difficulties of my trade which I had 

 not well mastered. Another unalloyed dramatic 

 pleasure which Fleeming and I shared the year of 

 the Paris Exposition, was the Marquis de Villemefy 

 that blameless play, performed by Madeleine 

 Brohan, Delaunay, Worms, and Broisat — an 

 actress, in such parts at least, to whom I have 

 never seen full justice rendered. He had his fill of 

 weeping on that occasion ; and when the piece was 

 at an end, in front of a cafe, in the mild, midnight 

 air, we had our fill of talk about the art of acting. 



But what gave the stage so strong a hold on Private 

 Fleeming was an inheritance from Norwich, from 

 Edward Barron, and from Enfield of the Speaker, 

 The theatre was one of Edward Barron's elegant 

 hobbies ; he read plays, as became Enfield's 

 son-in-law, with a good discretion ; He wrote 

 plays for his family, in which Eliza Barron used 

 to shine in the chief parts ; and later in life, after 

 the Norwich home was broken up, his little grand- 

 daughter would sit behind him in a great armchair, 

 and be introduced, with his stately elocution, to 

 the world of dramatic literature. From this, in 

 a direct line, we can deduce the charades at Clay- 



