CONTENTS. Bound to John Company; or the Adventures and Misadven- Chap. XXX. Treachery recoils on the Traitor XXXI. I make a strange Discovery 261 405 503 53 59 Late Prince Consort, The, as a Composer 469 Letters from Lilliput; being Essays on the Extremely Little: No. IX. On Little Donkeys 275 x. On a Little Learning-and is it a Dangerous London Theatres and London Actors: No. III. Drury-Lane Theatre (continued): Miss Bellamy, IV. Drury Lane Theatre (continued): Edmund Kean, Macready, Miss Faucit, Mrs. Glover, "Jack Bannister," "Joe Munden," Stephen v. Drury Lane Theatre (concluded) - Olympic 230 394 PAGE 22 149 On Stage Costume, with some Reflections on my Lord Syd- ney's Rescript 101 First down in the Morning Drawn by L. Huard. Frontispiece F. J. Skill 56 85 118 . 157 181 . 218 266 305 325 Alfred Thompson BELGRAVIA MARCH 1869 MY ENEMY'S DAUGHTER BY JUSTIN M'CARTHY AUTHOR OF "PAUL MASSIE," "THE WATERDALE NEIGHBOURS," etc. CHAPTER XIV. AN ODD INTERview and an unexpected Meeting. AR RE there any poor people who never felt an impress of something like awe and timidity at their first direct contact with wealth? I have heard and read of noble, independent beings, serene in the unsurpassed and conscious dignity of mere manhood, who, in whatever poverty, never felt the faintest flutter of envy, awe, or humiliation when they stood for the first time in the presence of a great man's flunkeys, and asked to see the great man himself. Are there such persons? I don't say I disbelieve in their existence, but I should like to hear, on the authority of someone more skilled than I to penctrate the secrets of human consciousness, that there really are beings of that kind before I quite believe in them. My own impression is, that civilised man or woman of humble class hardly ever yet knocked for the first time at the door of a great West-end mansion without a beating of the heart, a mingling of awe and humiliation. It is very mean and shabby and unworthy, and so are most of our instinctive impulses, which at last we school down, or are schooled and mastered by. Deep, deep down in our civilised nature is rooted the abject homage to wealth. I almost think it begins with the wearing of clothes. I doubt whether the very next stage of civilisation after nakedness does not witness the internal growth of that servile sentiment. I think we keep singing our "A man's a man for a' that," and our "Vilain et très-vilain," in order to drown the feeling or exorcise it, as they play martial airs to keep up the manhood of the raw recruit. Of course we get over it sometimes; at least, thank Heaven, we do not all succumb to it wholly. I am not much of a sneak myself, and I never yet sought the patronage of a man of rank, or put myself in his way to get his nod, or bragged to my acquaintance that I VOL. VIII. B had met him, and I know that I am no whit more independent than many of my neighbours,- but I have felt the poor man's sentiment of awe for wealth; I have done to wealth the involuntary homage of being afraid, and hearing my heart beat, as I stood in its august, unfamiliar presence. Many of my friends are people connected somehow with the world of art, and who have made their way up from nothing. Some of them have fine West-end houses now, of their own, and carriages, and awful footmen in livery; but I think if I were talking confidentially with each of them in turn over a cigar and a glass of brandy-and-water, he would frankly admit that one of the most trying moments of his life-one of the moments when he found it hardest to keep up his dignity of independent and equal manhood-was just the first time when, having knocked at some great man's door, he waited for the opening of it, and the presence of the flunkey. Now I stood this Sunday morning at the door of Mr. Lyndon, M.P., and I realised these sensations. I had come to ask no favour— to seek no patronage-to bespeak no recognition-to pave the way for no acquaintanceship. If anything, I was coming out of my regular beat of life rather to confer a favour than to solicit one; and yet I did feel that ignoble, nervous tremor which the unaccustomed presence of wealth inspires in the poor man, and which is the base image, the false coin, the bastard brother of the soul's involuntary homage to beauty and greatness. I knocked at the door, and as I waited for its opening, I felt so nervous that I grew positively ashamed of myself, and took my courage in two hands, as the French phrase goes, and remembered about a man being a man for a' that. Mr. Lyndon, M.P., lived in a fine house in Connaught-place, looking straight into Hyde-park. One had to go up high steps to get to the door, which lent additional majesty and dread to the business. It was, as I have said, a Sunday; and as I came hither I had passed crowds of people streaming out of the doors of fashionable churches, and seen splendidly-dressed women, all velvets and satins and feathers, assisted into their carriages by footmen who carried gilded prayerbooks; and I wondered whether Mr. Lyndon had been to church, and if so whether he would have come back from his worship by the time I reached his house, and whether it was a dreadful heathenish sort of thing, a kind of outrage upon Church and State, to ask to see such a man at all on Sunday. To go to church, too, seemed, in presence of the splendid crowds, so necessary and becoming a part of respectability, that I felt like a social outlaw because I had not been there, and was not much in the habit of going there. My sensations were not the pangs of an awakened conscience, but the kind of feeling which goes through a man who, unshaved and with muddy boots, unconsciously intrudes into the midst of a well-dressed and elegant company. When I found out Mr. Lyndon's house, I wondered much why such a man, especially if he was in the habit of going to church, could not |