My happy year in Edinburgh ended, I returned to London, to our house in James Street, Buckingham Gate, where I found my parents much burdened with care and anxiety about the affairs of the theater, which were rapidly falling into irretrievable embarrassment. My father toiled incessantly, but the tide of ill-success and losing fortune had set steadily against him, and the attempt to stem it became daily harder and more hopeless. I used sometimes to hear some of the sorrowful details of this dreary struggle, and I well remember the indignation and terror I experienced when one day my father said at dinner, "I have had a new experience to-day: I have been arrested for the first time in my life." I believe my father was never personally in debt during all his life; he said he never had been up to that day, and I am very sure he never was afterward. Through all the severe labor of his professional life, and his strenuous exertions to maintain his family and educate my brothers like gentlemen, and my sister and myself with every advantage, he never incurred the misery of falling into debt, but paid his way as he went along, with difficulty, no doubt, but still steadily and successfully, "owing no man any thing." But the suit in question was brought against him as one of the proprietors of the theater, for a debt which the theater owed; and, moreover, was that of a person whom he had befriended and helped forward, and who had always professed the most sincere gratitude and attachment to him. The constantly darkening prospects of that unlucky theater threw a gloom over us all; sometimes my father used to speak of selling his share in it for any thing he could get for it (and Heaven knows it was not likely to be much!), and going to live abroad; or sending my mother, with us, to live cheaply in the south of France, while he continued to work in London. Neither alternative was cheerful for him or my poor mother, and I felt very sorrowful for them, though I thought I should like living in the south of France better than in London. I was working with a good deal of enthusiasm at a tragedy on the subject of Fiesco, the Genoese noble's conspiracy against the Dorias—a subject which had made a great impression upon me when I first read Schiller's noble play upon it. My own former fancy about going on the stage, and passionate desire for a lonely, independent life in which it had originated, had died away with the sort of moral and mental effervescence which had subsided during my year's residence in Edinburgh. Although all my sympathy with the anxieties of my parents tended to make the theater an object of painful interest to me, and though my own attempts at poetical composition were constantly cast in a dramatic form, in spite of my enthusiastic admiration of Goethe's and Schiller's plays (which, however, I could only read in French or English translations, for I then knew no German) and my earnest desire to write a good play myself, the idea of making the stage my profession had entirely passed from my mind, which was absorbed with the wish and endeavor to produce a good dramatic composition. The turn I had exhibited for acting at school appeared to have evaporated, and Covent Garden itself never occurred to me as a great institution for purposes of art or enlightened public recreation, but only as my father's disastrous property, to which his life was being sacrificed; and every thought connected with it gradually became more and more distasteful to me. It appears to me curious, that up to this time, I literally knew nothing of Shakespeare, beyond having seen one or two of his plays acted; I had certainly never read one of them through, nor did I do so until some time later, when I began to have to learn parts in them by heart.
I think the rather serious bias which my mind had developed while I was still in Scotland tended probably to my greater contentment in my home, and to the total disinclination which I should certainly now have felt for a life of public exhibition. My dramatic reading and writing was curiously blended with a very considerable interest in literature of a very different sort, and with the perusal of such works as Mason on "Self-Knowledge," Newton's "Cardiphonia," and a great variety of sermons and religious essays. My mother, observing my tendency to reading on religious subjects, proposed to me to take my first communion. She was a member of the Swiss Protestant Church, the excellent pastor of which, the Rev. Mr. S——, was our near neighbor, and we were upon terms of the friendliest intimacy with him and his family. In his church I received the sacrament for the first time, but I do not think with the most desirable effect. The only immediate result that I can remember of this increase of my Christian profession and privileges was, I am sorry to say, a rigid pharisaical formalism, which I carried so far as to decline accompanying my father and mother to our worthy clergyman's house, one Sunday, when we were invited to spend the evening with him and his family. This sort of acrid fruit is no uncommon first harvest of youthful religious zeal; and I suppose my parents and my worthy pastor thought it a piece of unripe, childish, impertinent conscientiousness, hardly deserving a serious rebuke.
Another of my recollections which belong to this time is seeing several times at our house that exceedingly coarse, disagreeable, clever, and witty man, Theodore Hook. I always had a dread of his loud voice, and blazing red face, and staring black eyes; especially as on more than one occasion his after-dinner wit seemed to me fitter for the table he had left than the more refined atmosphere of the drawing-room. One day he dined with us to meet my cousin Horace Twiss and his handsome new wife. Horace had in a lesser degree some of Hook's wonderful sense of humor and quickness of repartee, and the two men brought each other out with great effect. Of course I had heard of Mr. Hook's famous reply when, after having returned from the colonies, where he was in an official position, under suspicion of peculation, a friend meeting him said, "Why, hallo, Hook! I did not know you were in England! What has brought you back again?" "Something wrong about the chest," replied the imperturbable wit. He was at this time the editor of the John Bull, a paper of considerable ability, and only less scurrility than the Age; and in spite of his chest difficulty he was much sought in society for his extraordinary quickness and happiness in conversation. His outrageous hoax of the poor London citizen, from whom he extorted an agonized invitation to dinner by making him believe that he and Charles Mathews were public surveyors, sent to make observations for a new road, which was to go straight through the poor shopkeeper's lawn, flower-garden, and bedroom, he has, I believe, introduced into his novel of "Gilbert Gurney." But not, of course, with the audacious extemporaneous song with which he wound up the joke, when, having eaten and drank the poor citizen's dinner, prepared for a small party of citizen friends (all the time assuring him that he and his friend would use their very best endeavors to avert the threatened invasion of his property by the new line of road), he proposed singing a song, to the great delight of the unsophisticated society, the concluding verse of which was—
"And now I am bound to declare
That your wine is as good as your cook,
And that this is Charles Mathews, the player,
And I, sir, am Theodore Hook."
He always demanded, when asked for a specimen of his extemporizing power, that a subject should be given to him. I do not remember, on one occasion, what was suggested in the first instance, but after some discussion Horace Twiss cried out, "The Jews." It was the time of the first mooting of the question of the Jews being admitted to stand for Parliament and having seats in the House, and party spirit ran extremely high upon the subject. Theodore Hook shrugged his shoulders and made a discontented grimace, as if baffled by his theme, the Jews. However, he went to the piano, threw back his head, and began strumming a galloping country-dance tune, to which he presently poured forth the most inconceivable string of witty, comical, humorous, absurd allusions to everybody present as well as to the subject imposed upon him. Horace Twiss was at that time under-secretary either for foreign affairs or the colonies, and Hook took occasion to say, or rather sing, that the foreign department could have little charms for a man who had so many more in the home, with an indication to Annie Twiss; the final verse of this real firework of wit was this—
"I dare say you think there's little wit
In this, but you've all forgot
That, instead of being a jeu d'esprit,
'Tis only a jeu de mot,"
pronouncing the French words as broadly as possible, "a Jew d'esprit, and 'tis only a Jew de motte," for the sake of the rhyme, and his subject, the Jews. It certainly was all through a capital specimen of ready humor. I remember on another occasion hearing him exercise his singular gift in a manner that seemed to me as unjustifiable as it was disagreeable. I met him at dinner at Sir John McDonald's, then adjutant-general, a very kind and excellent friend of mine. Mrs. Norton and Lord C——, who were among the guests, both came late, and after we had gone into the dining-room, where they were received with a discreet quantity of mild chaff, Mrs. Norton being much too formidable an adversary to be challenged lightly. After dinner, however, when the men came up into the drawing-room, Theodore Hook was requested to extemporize, and having sung one song, was about to leave the piano in the midst of the general entreaty that he would not do so, when Mrs. Norton, seating herself close to the instrument so that he could not leave it, said, in her most peculiar, deep, soft, contralto voice, which was like her beautiful dark face set to music, "I am going to sit down here, and you shall not come away, for I will keep you in like an iron crow." There was nothing about her manner or look that could suggest any thing but a flattering desire to enjoy Hook's remarkable talent in some further specimen of his power of extemporizing, and therefore I suppose there must have been some previous ill-will or heart-burning on his part toward her—she was reckless enough in her use of her wonderful wit and power of saying the most intolerable stinging things, to have left a smart on some occasion in Hook's memory, for which he certainly did his best to pay her then. Every verse of the song he now sang ended with his turning with a bow to her, and the words, "my charming iron crow;" but it was from beginning to end a covert satire of her and her social triumphs; even the late arrival at dinner and its supposed causes were duly brought in, still with the same mock-respectful inclination to his "charming iron crow." Everybody was glad when the song was over, and applauded it quite as much from a sense of relief as from admiration of its extraordinary cleverness; and Mrs. Norton smilingly thanked Hook, and this time made way for him to leave the piano.
We lived near each other at this time, we in James Street, Buckingham Gate, and the Nortons at Storey's Gate, at the opposite end of the Birdcage Walk. We both of us frequented the same place of worship—a tiny chapel wedged in among the buildings at the back of Downing Street, the entrance to which was from the park; it has been improved away by the new government offices. Our dinner at the McDonalds' was on a Saturday, and the next day, as we were walking part of the way home together from church, Mrs. Norton broke out about Theodore Hook and his odious ill-nature and abominable coarseness, saying that it was a disgrace and a shame that for the sake of his paper, the John Bull, and its influence, the Tories should receive such a man in society. I, who but for her outburst upon the subject should have carefully avoided mentioning Hook's name, presuming that after his previous evening's performance it could not be very agreeable to Mrs. Norton, now, not knowing very well what to say, but thinking the Sheridan blood (especially in her veins) might have some sympathy with and find some excuse for him, suggested the temptation that the possession of such wit must always be, more or less, to the abuse of it. "Witty!" exclaimed the indignant beauty, with her lip and nostril quivering, "witty! One may well be witty when one fears neither God nor devil!" I was heartily glad Hook was not there; he was not particular about the truth, and would infallibly, in some shape or other, have translated for her benefit, "Je crains Dieu, cher Abner, et n'ai point d'autre crainte."
The Nortons' house was close to the issue from St. James's Park into Great George Street. I remember passing an evening with them there, when a host of distinguished public and literary men were crowded into their small drawing-room, which was literally resplendent with the light of Sheridan beauty, male and female: Mrs. Sheridan (Miss Callender, of whom, when she published a novel, the hero of which commits forgery, that wicked wit, Sidney Smith, said he knew she was a Callender, but did not know till then that she was a Newgate calendar), the mother of the Graces, more beautiful than anybody but her daughters; Lady Grahame, their beautiful aunt; Mrs. Norton, Mrs. Blackwood (Lady Dufferin), Georgiana Sheridan (Duchess of Somerset and queen of beauty by universal consent), and Charles Sheridan, their younger brother, a sort of younger brother of the Apollo Belvedere. Certainly I never saw such a bunch of beautiful creatures all growing on one stem. I remarked it to Mrs. Norton, who looked complacently round her tiny drawing-room and said, "Yes, we are rather good-looking people." I remember this evening because of the impression made on me by the sight of these wonderfully "good-looking people" all together, and also because of my having had to sing with Moore—an honor and glory hardly compensating the distress of semi-strangulation, in order to avoid drowning his feeble thread of a voice with the heavy, robust contralto which I found it very difficult to swallow half of, while singing second to him, in his own melodies, with the other half. My acquaintance with Mrs. Norton lasted through a period of many years, and, though never very intimate, was renewed with cordiality each time I returned to England. It began just after I came out on the stage, when I was about twenty, and she a few years older. My father and mother had known her parents and grandparents, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Miss Lindley, from whom their descendants derived the remarkable beauty and brilliant wit which distinguished them.
My mother was at Drury Lane when Mr. Sheridan was at the head of its administration, and has often described to me the extraordinary proceedings of that famous first night of "Pizarro," when, at last keeping the faith he had so often broken with the public, Mr. Sheridan produced that most effective of melodramas, with my aunt and uncle's parts still unfinished, and, depending upon their extraordinary rapidity of study, kept them learning the last scenes of the last act, which he was still writing, while the beginning of the piece was being performed. By the by, I do not know what became of the theories about the dramatic art, and the careful and elaborate study necessary for its perfection. In this particular instance John Kemble's Rolla and Mrs. Siddons's Elvira must have been what may be called extemporaneous acting. Not impossibly, however, these performances may have gained in vivid power and effect what they lost in smoothness and finish, from the very nervous strain and excitement of such a mental effort as the actors were thus called upon to make. My mother remembered well, too, the dismal Saturdays when, after prolonged periods of non-payment of their salaries, the poorer members of the company, and all the unfortunate work-people, carpenters, painters, scene-shifters, understrappers of all sorts, and plebs in general of the great dramatic concern, thronging the passages and staircases, would assail Sheridan on his way to the treasury with pitiful invocations: "For God's sake, Mr. Sheridan, pay us our salaries!" "For Heaven's sake, Mr. Sheridan, let us have something this week!" and his plausible reply of, "Certainly, certainly, my good people, you shall be attended to directly." Then he would go into the treasury, sweep it clean of the whole week's receipts (the salaries of the principal actors, whom he dared not offend and could not dispense with, being, if not wholly, partially paid), and, going out of the building another way, leave the poor people who had cried to him for their arrears of wages baffled and cheated of the price of their labor for another week. The picture was not a pleasant one.