he visit of that wonderful
man.--"I declare I feel as if I could pray!" cried one of us, on the
return from _Hamlet_.--"That is prayer," said Fleeming. W. B. Hole and
I, in a fine enthusiasm of gratitude, determined to draw up an address
to Salvini, did so, and carried it to Fleeming; and I shall never forget
with what coldness he heard and deleted the eloquence of our draft, nor
with what spirit (our vanities once properly mortified) he threw himself
into the business of collecting signatures. It was his part, on the
ground of his Italian, to see and arrange with the actor; it was mine to
write in the _Academy_ a notice of the first performance of _Macbeth_.
Fleeming opened the paper, 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
ignorance; 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 Fleeming was an inheritance
from Norwich, from Edward Barren, 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
granddaughter would sit behind him in a great arm-chair, 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
Claygate; and after money came, in the Edinburgh days, that private
theatre which took up so much of Fleeming's energy and thought. The
company--Mr. and Mrs. R. O. Carter of Colwall, W. B. Hole, Captain
Charles Douglas, Mr. Kunz, Mr. Burnett, Professor Lewis Campbell, Mr.
Charles Baxter, and many more--made a charming society for themselves,
and gave pleasure to their