Burnand's humour was different from Gilbert's: he excelled as a punster. From his earliest days he was devoted to the theatre and founded the A.D.C. at Cambridge. He wrote with marvellous rapidity. When he saw Diplomacy, in the height of the play's original success, he left the theatre, sat up through the night, began and finished a most amusing travesty, which he called Diplunacy.
Years ago my son was at Ramsgate, reading for an examination in the law. He met Burnand, who asked what he had been doing. George told him that he had been on the Goodwins with his "coach." Burnand replied that he had no idea you could drive there!
He told me once that, in spite of every kind of exercise, he was a slave to liver—a livery servant. One of the best of his many smart things was said when he was recovering from a serious illness. A journalist friend paid him a sympathetic visit, and said: "Your condition has been so grave that my editor asked me to write an obituary notice of you, adding that he wished it to be generous and that I must give you a column." Burnand at once exclaimed: "A column! Why, that's all they gave Nelson."
My first meeting with Oscar Wilde was at Oxford. He had recently "come down," but was visiting a friend there. His appearance suggested to me that he might have prompted Disraeli to write these words, they seemed so accurately to apply to the once spoiled darling: "The affectations of youth should be viewed leniently; every man has a right to be conceited until he is successful."
I think the best plays from his pen were Lady Windermere's Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest.
He was talking with us about one of his comedies, just produced, when my wife remarked that the leading situation rather reminded her of the great scene in a play by Scribe, to which Wilde unblushingly replied: "Taken bodily from it, dear lady. Why not? Nobody reads nowadays."
He once congratulated us when we wrote some account of ourselves, on and off the stage, on not having waited, as most people do, until they have lost all memory.
Robert Marshall
One of many heavy blows I have naturally had to bear during my fifty-six years' membership of the Garrick Club was through the loss of Robert Marshall. His was a strange career. The last man to imagine who could claim the honour of rising from the ranks, through failing to pass an examination, to be a captain in the army. He had left it before we met, but was always smart and soldierly in appearance.
He wrote some charming plays, with a distinctive quality of their own. I recall especially A Royal Family, His Excellency the Governor, The Second in Command, and The Duke of Killiecrankie. What pleasant evenings they gave us! When he was stricken and his friends knew that his lease of life was not to be renewed, he was lying in a nursing home close to Portland Place. A man who loved him was sitting by his bed-side one afternoon when Marshall's quick ear caught the sound of approaching military music. It was the band of the Horse Guards on the way from Albany Street barracks to a Royal function. He started up in bed and with a far-off look in his eyes, his mind having travelled back to his soldier days, listened for the last time to the trumpets and the drums: as their sound died away he fell back on his pillow in a flood of tears.