there could apparently be no anecdote that was not on the whole to his honor. If he had come into a room at any moment, people might have said frankly, "Of course we were telling stories about you!" As consciences go, in London, the general conscience would have been good. Moreover, it would have been impossible to imagine his taking such a tribute otherwise than amiably, for he was always as unperturbed as an actor with the right cue. He had never in his life needed the prompter—his very embarrassments had been rehearsed. For myself, when he was talked about I always had an odd impression that we were speaking of the dead—it was with that peculiar accumulation of relish. His reputation was a kind of gilded obelisk, as if he had been buried beneath it; the body of legend and reminiscence, of which he was to be the subject, had crystallized in advance.
This ambiguity sprang, I suppose, from the fact that the mere sound of his name and air of his person, the general expectation he created, were, somehow, too exalted
