Caldwell felt a strong interest in the young actor, and was of service to him outside of the theatre as well as within it. He introduced him to a higher order of society with more aristocratic manners and refined accomplishments than he had been accustomed to, thus affording him an opportunity, had he been so minded, to make his upward way socially not less than professionally. As a keen observer and a quick learner, he did not fail to reap some valuable fruits from the advantages thus afforded him. But his forte lay not in this direction. He had then, and always afterwards, a deep distaste to all that is called fashionable society. He was insuperably democratic in his very bones. For the elaborate forms and conventionalities of the polite world he had a rooted repugnance. He wanted to be free and downright in honest speech and demeanor, making his outer manifestations correspond exactly with his inner states. He could not bear, in accordance with the conventions of the best society, to pretend to be inferior where he felt himself superior, to affect to be interested when he was bored, to express insincere nothings to give pleasure, and carefully hide his most earnest thoughts and feelings lest they should give pain. This art of polished intercourse--quite necessary in our world, and often as artistic and useful as it is artificial and compromising--he vehemently disliked and was never an adept in. Instead of gracefully appropriating it for its gracious uses while spurning its evils, he impatiently rebelled against it, stigmatizing it in blunt phrase as a cursed hypocrisy. This defect in him it is needful to recognize as one of the keys to his character and career. His athletic, bluff nature, true and generous, lacked the flexible suavity of the spirituelle qualities, a lack which prevented his universal success, causing him to jar on persons of squeamish disposition or fastidious taste. Until a long series of revulsive experiences had trained him to be silent and reticent, his impulsive frankness and passionate love of freedom made it extremely irksome and chafing to him purposely to adapt himself to others at the expense of his own honest emotions. He never could be in the slightest degree a courtier or a tuft-hunter, but--like Edmund Kean, and many another man of genius whose abounding and impetuous soul loved nature and truth in their spontaneous forms more than any of the gilded substitutes for them--he ever preferred to be with those in whose presence he could act himself out just as he was and just as he felt. His playing in the theatre, instead of fitting, by reaction unfitted him for playing in society. If, on the stage, he consented to seem, all the more, off from it, he desired to be. The basis of this veritable self-assertion was his vigorous manliness; and so far it was creditable to him. But the extravagance to which he carried it partook of pride and wilfulness, and was an error and a fault. The code