This is to be a talk about some wealthy men that I have known and heard of. I was once a wealthy man myself; a friend of mine confessed to me quite lately that he had been a capitalist in his day; and then there is a great figure in musical history, known well enough for his work, but not generally recognised as being amongst the very rich. To begin with my friend. This is Mr. Lenville, the well-known actor. We were talking the other day as we often do talk about the old times of the stage, of which I know a very little, and he a great deal; the old times being understood to be somewhere between thirty and forty years ago. There is no doubt that they were bad old times. Now a bright young gentleman “walks on” for six months or so. He has little paragraphs in the papers about the amazingly brilliant way in which he walks on, and how interesting it is that he should walk on at all. Then he has a small part; and there are portraits and clever caricatures as well as paragraphs. Then he models in clay a little, and the public interest, as the paragraphists declare, is enormous, so that he gets quite a large part and delivers it so naturally that very few people beyond the front row of the stalls hear a word he says. The bright young man’s fortune is then made. Things were very different in the time of which Mr. Lenville was talking. In those days people had to learn how to act before they were heard of in the western theatres of London. They learned how to act by playing dozens, hundreds of parts in all sorts of obscure playhouses in the country and in the unknown suburbs. They laboured in stock companies in northern towns, at the Britannia, Hoxton; they went on tour in repertory. They were hungry for experience and for bread and cheese and beer. They tried the booths for a while, some of them, and learned what “nunty munjare” means, and how to put the “portable” together, take it to pieces, and get the snow off the roof; also to paint scenery and manufacture dress shirts and shoes and medi?val armour out of white paper, American cloth, and sheet tin, and, by the way, to learn the text of any part ever written in rather less than no time. I remember one of the old stock managers saying to me:

“So I made up my mind to put up ‘Venice Preserved,’ and gave the company three days for study. The Heavy Man said to me: ‘Look here, I can’t study the Cardinal in three days.’ I talked to him. ‘You play the Heavy Lead, don’t you?’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but I can’t study 500 lengths in three days.’ ‘Well, the Cardinal is the heavy part, isn’t it?’ ‘I know.’ ‘Then,’ said I, ‘you’d better go’; and one of the Responsibles took it on, and was perfect on the night.”

Well, it was of such times as those that Mr. Lenville was telling me. He and his friend, Mr. Folair, were in a very bad way. There was nothing doing, and very little to eat. So the two of them walked up one fine morning to the Grand, Islington, where a stock company was running, in the hopes of getting an engagement. But there was no vacancy. They came out into the sunlight, with twopence between them, and walked over to the Angel, and, boldly entering the public bar, ordered a pint of four ale, which they drank slowly, in alternate sips, out of the pewter pot. And as they drank, they discussed the best way to walk home. This was an easy problem for Lenville, who lived in Marylebone, but a formidable business for Folair, an inhabitant of uttermost Hammersmith. And so Lenville gave his views on the subject of the shortest cut to Hammersmith, i............