On that particular night he was very chatty, and in commenting on the play compared, strangely enough, Caleb Balderstone with Falstaff. He was interested and eager about everything round him and asked innumerable questions. In the course of conversation he said that he had always taken it for granted that the stage word “properties” included costumes.
He was seemingly delighted with that visit, and from that time on whenever he came to the theatre he always occupied the same place, Mrs. Gladstone and whoever might be with him sitting in Irving’s box close at hand.
II
The next time he came, which was on January 29 of the next year, 1891, he generously brought Irving a cheque for ten pounds for the Actors’ Benevolent Fund. That evening too he was delighted with the play, Much Ado About Nothing, which he had seen before in 1882, in the ordinary way. He applauded loudly, just as he used to do when sitting in the front of the house.
III
He came again in 1892, May 7, when we were playing Henry VIII., and in the course of conversation commented on Froude’s estimate of the population of England in the sixteenth century, which according to his ideas had been stated much below the mark. He also spoke of Dante being in Oxford—a subject about which he wrote in the Nineteenth Century in the next month.
Another instance of Mr. Gladstone’s visit to the Lyceum: on the evening of February 25, 1893, he came to see Becket. He had introduced his second Home Rule Bill on the thirteenth of the month, and as it was being discussed he was naturally full of it—so were we all. By the way the Bill was carried in the Commons at the end of August of that year. That night when speaking of his new Bill, he said to me:
“I will venture to say that in four or five years those who oppose it will wonder what it was that they opposed!”
He was delighted with Becket, and seemed specially to rejoice in the success of Tennyson’s work.