Happily he had his own way, and with the help of the fine lines transferred from _Ninon_, the play was received with acclamation, and, finely acted as it is now by Mr. H. B. Irving and his wife, it never fails to move an audience.
I think it was John Clayton who was the original Oliver Cromwell. I was told that his make-up was one of the most realistic ever seen. He was Cromwell--to the wart! Some one who came upon him in his dressing-room was lost in admiration of the perfection of the picture, and declared that the painter should sign it in the corner, "John Clayton, pinx." But perhaps the actor and artist was Swinburne.
Only one more word in the Bateman connection. The varying fortunes of the family are well known--how the Bateman children made a marvellous success for a tune--how the eldest, Kate, played for months and years in _Leah_, filling the treasury of every theatre in England and America--how when the Lyceum was at the point of closing its odors, _The Bells_ rang in an era of prosperity for all concerned; but I don't suppose that many people know' that Mrs. Bateman, the wife of "The Colonel," was the author of several novels which she wrote for newspapers at one of the "downs" that preceded the "ups" in her life.
And Compton Mackenzie is Mrs. Bateman's grandson!
And Fay Compton is Compton Mackenzie's youngest sister.
It was melancholy--but Atheist Friswell alone was to blame for it--that we should sit out through that lovely evening and talk about tawdry theatricals, and that same tawdriness more than a little musty through time. If Friswell had not begun with his nonsense about having seen my Temple somewhere down Oxford Street we should never have wandered from the subject of gardens until we lost ourselves among the wings of the Lyceum and its "profiles" of its pines in _Iolanthe_, and its "built" yews and pomegranates in _Romeo and Juliet_. But among the perfume of the roses surrounding us, with an occasional whiff of the lavender mound and a gracious breath like that of
we continued talking of theatres until the summer night was reeking with the smell of sawdust and oranges, to say nothing of the fragrance of the _poudre de ninon_ of the stalls, wafted over opera wraps and diamond-studded shirt-fronts--diamond studs, when just over the glimmering marble of my temple the Evening Star was glowing!