My friendly critics of the London press told me that a middle-aged man had taken to the stage as a duck takes to water. It was a bit of kindly nonsense. I had worked like a galley-slave for nine months, and the nine months of a man of the world is worth the nine years of a boy. And do I profess to be an actor now? Not a bit of it, my friendly critic--not a bit of it, in all honesty. But I mean to be. There is no art so difficult--granted; but there is none so enchanting, so inspiring. Night after night for a whole week, bar Saturday, when Nature took a late revenge, I left a sick-room at Newcastle-on-Tyne; and every ache and pain fell away, and the sick treble changed to a healthy baritone, and manly strength came to pluck the halting pace of the invalid to marching time, and a feebly intermittent pulse grew full and calm at the splendid all-compelling influence of the stage. Had it been a cold lecture, now, or a speech on politics--and no man loves that kind of exercise more than I--the armchair and the warm fireside had not reached to me and beamed on me in vain. But the stage? That was another matter altogether. It is a better stimulant than the society of old friends. It is a finer anodyne than tobacco. It is a quicker and more constant pick-me-up than champagne. Sternest duty and purest pleasure wear one smiling face. And to think that I was well into the forties before I guessed this splendid truth! But Nature is compensatory in everything, and her balance works in this accessible fairyland as elsewhere. The stage is the natural home of petty _contretemps_. When a man has dared to play in a piece of his own writing in a city like London it would be absurd to affect modesty or a want of belief in his own power to please. If under such conditions a man had no such faith, he would be an ass beyond the reach of satire. What else but faith in himself should bring him there? 'Que diable faisait-il dans _cette_ galère?' Yet the bold amateur intruding is conscious of a resemblance in himself to the demons mentioned in Holy Writ He believes (in himself), but he trembles.