atrabiliar mood, advised him to sweep crossings, black shoes, break
stones by the roadside, cart manure, sell tripe or stocks and
shares, blow out his brains rather than enter a profession over
whose portals was inscribed the legend, Lasciate ogni speranza--he
snapped his finger and thumb to summon memory as if it were a dog.

"Voi che intrate," continued Paul, delighted at showing off the one
Italian tag he had picked up from his reading. And filled with one
of the purest joys of the young literary life and therefore
untouched by pessimistic counsel, he left the despairing actor.

The second, a brighter and more successful man, talked with Paul for
a long time about all manner of things. Having no notion of his
antecedents, he assumed him to be a friend of Rowlatt and met him on
terms of social equality. Paul expanded like a flower to the sun. It
was the first time he had spoken with an educated man on common
ground--a man to whom the great imaginative English writers were
familiar friends, who ran from Chaucer to Lamb and from Dryden to
Browning with amazing facility. The strong wine of allusive talk
mounted to Paul's brain. Tingling with excitement, he brought out
all his small artillery of scholarship and acquitted himself so well
that his host sent him off with a cordial letter to a manager of his
acquaintance.

The letter opened the difficult door of the theatre. His absurd
beauty of face and figure, a far greater recommendation in the eyes
of the manager who had begun rehearsals for an elaborate romantic
production than a knowledge of The Faerie Queene, obtained for him
an immediate engagement--to walk on as a gilded youth of Italy in
two or three scenes at a salary of thirty shillings a week. Paul