It does not need an alphabet of scholastic degrees to enable a man to back a double event and find both of them to be losers. And yet old E――――’s epigram, that looked at the time so like real stable information, was but a huckster’s tip after all. Most of my relatives and all my real friends, those who know best, have cheerily shaken their heads at the word ability――did so, I remember, at the time――and have admitted that he was wrong there, but even E―――― himself would not now, I think, gainsay the fact that I have stayed the course. And yet my innate reverence for the school-master is such that I have an uneasy feeling that I ought to have so shaped my life that the words of the school-master might be fulfilled, and that in not having done so I am in danger of judgment.
The early days of the Bar are all overtime. And the first big overtime job that I undertook, and perhaps the pleasantest I ever carried through, was the preparation of a version of “Dorothy Osborne’s Letters,” the first edition of which I finished in my early days at Manchester, and published in 1888. I remember my joy when Mr. Comyns Carr, who then edited the _English Illustrated Magazine_, accepted my first essay on Dorothy Osborne. How I still reverence his critical acumen. The joys of winning a legal scholarship, or having that first brief at quarter sessions delivered to you by a real solicitor’s clerk, have none of that _tremens_ delirium about them that you attain when your literary essay is accepted in a courteous autograph from a master in letters. The manuscript of “Dorothy Osborne’s Letters,” like all great works, was refused by many of the leading publishers, and when it was published the book was an immediate success. It has been pirated in many countries, and will, I think, remain in the English library, not on account of any work of mine, but because of the peculiar charm of Mistress Dorothy’s style in letter-writing. It was a satisfactory bit of “overtime.”
My next book was a life of Macklin, the actor, written for a series edited by William Archer. Mr. Lowe wrote a life of Betterton. Mr. Archer himself wrote Macready, and then came my “Life of Macklin.” For some reason or other that ended the series. It was not half a bad book, and a friend of mine in Dublin says my chapter on the Irish stage has amused and entertained him for many pleasant hours in tracing out and confuting by authority the errors and inaccuracies it contains――but, then, he admits that no other Saxon had ever dared to try and write such a chapter.