When I saw the play of her features, and heard the calm, subdued energy of her voice, I felt little doubt that her prophecy would be accomplished. I, however, began to feel some very lively doubts as to Hamlet, and it required several criticisms from my mother, and a great deal of stamping and grimacing before the mirror, to restore me to the enjoyment of the sunshine of self-respect. At last Catsbach returned. He sent to announce his arrival, and to say he would join me that evening, and bring with him a literary friend, who might be very useful to me in my dramatic career. They came. "Let me introduce you to my friend, Mr Wormwood, the orator and poet," said Catsbach, shaking me by the hand very warmly himself. "You will be the best friends in the world; and Wormwood has been very anxious for a long time to make your acquaintance." The stranger bowed low, and so did I; not without a strong tickling of my vanity at the wideness of my reputation. We sat down, and I could contemplate my visitor at full leisure. He was a little man, of whom the prevailing feature was a nose of astonishing prominence, that overshadowed not only the remaining features of his face, but the whole of his person. It formed the central point of his whole organisation, and was, in fact, Mr Wormwood, without the help either of face or figure. His brow retreated in apparent alarm, pulling the eyebrows with it nearly to the top of the skull; his chin also had retired into his neck, and there was nothing visible but the one prevailing feature—a pyramid in a waste of sand. The sudden retrocession of his brow was only seen in profile; and as he was bald, and treated all the exposed skin of his head as forehead up to the very crown, he presented a very intellectual appearance in the eyes of those with whom high brows are considered "the dome of thought, the temple of the soul." His side hair was carefully combed off, so as to expose as great an expanse as possible; and it was evident that great pains were bestowed on the picturesqueness and poetry of the appearance—a small thin man, rather shabbily drest, and with manners duly compounded of civility and pomp.
"I am delighted to know you, Mr De Bohun. I form a very high estimate, indeed, of your genius and accomplishments; though I have not yet had the pleasure of seeing any of your works."
"I am indebted to the good opinion—too much indebted, I fear—of our friend, Mr Catsbach," I replied.
"By no means. You have had a play ignominiously rejected by a brutal and unjudging world. Sir, I honour you on the triumph, and congratulate you on the success."
The man seemed quite serious as he spoke; so I looked for some explanation to his friend.
"Wormwood has achieved the same victory on several occasions," said Catsbach; "and on carefully going over his plays, according to the severest principles of art, he finds that they were ludicrously and inhumanly laughed at, or still more inhumanly refused a place on the stage, in exact proportion as their merits lifted them above the intellectual level of an audience, or the narrow understanding of a manager."
"Exactly so," said Wormwood; "and you will find it uniformly the case. Success in literature is almost the surest sign of an author's imbecility; and, à fortiori, public neglect a sign of his genius and erudition. I have already heard that your tragedy is refused; I hope to congratulate you on your Hamlet being hissed off the stage."
"Really, sir," I said, somewhat nettled, "I scarcely understand whether you are in jest or earnest; and I sincerely hope to escape your congratulations on my Hamlet, as I am not aware of any right I have acquired to them on the fate of the play."
"Was it not returned on your hands, sir? Catsbach certainly gave me to understand that you had attained that mark of eminence; but if you are still in danger of being accepted, and performed, I must withhold the expression of my praise till I see whether an audience will be more propitious than the manager, and overwhelm your tragedy with derision and contempt, as I have no doubt it deserves." After accompanying this with a smile, which he evidently meant to be propitiatory and complimentary, he seemed to retire for shelter behind his nose, and employed himself in throwing on each side any of the straggling locks that intruded on the sacred domain of his expansive brow.
"What sort of fool is this you have brought?" I said to Catsbach, availing myself of the temporary seclusion of our visitor behind the promontory I have described.