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 Villemer, 

 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 Barren'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- 



