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WILLIAM TERRISS AND THE ADELPHI 97
gentleman had called ', and that he seemed very persistent about seeing me. One day the girl informed me that the ' young gentleman ' had in a most determined way pushed past her, bounded up the steps, and walked into our little drawing-room, where he then was." Bancroft was disarmed by the frank manner of a handsome young fellow who had resolved " not to leave the house until I had given him an engagement ". After two seasons he married and went to seek his fortune in the Falkland Islands. Monte Video was in a state of siege. The emigrants, unable to land, transferred to a coasting schooner for the thousand miles to Stanley. Through foul weather the voyage lasted twenty-four days instead of ten, and rations were reduced to two biscuits and half a pint of water a day.
After six months of sheep-farming Lewin took passage for himself, his wife and their baby, Ellaline, in a Swedish whaler which had put in for repairs. Off Gibraltar their ship was lost in a fearful gale. Passengers and crew drifted in open boats in the Bay of Biscay for two days and nights until picked up by a ship bound for Falmouth. Now the traveller was at last reconciled to " raddle his face and go for hire upon the stage ". He played Robin Hood in Halliday's Rebecca (" Ivanhoe ") at Drury Lane. Yet he had not had his fill of wandering. With an introduction to Mr. Tattersall, nephew of Mr. Tattersall of Tattersalls, he went to Lexington, Kentucky, to try his hand at horsebreeding. It was too monotonous. He went to New York, lost all his belongings, and came home steerage. At Drury Lane he was given parts in Halliday's The Lady Of The Lake and Richard Coeur-de-Lion.
When The Belle's Stratagem was revived at the Strand in 1873, he played Doricourt, and a record run for this old comedy was the result. After that he was Romeo at Drury Lane. With neither training nor inclination, with nothing in his upbringing or family tree to account for such natural aptitude, the hero of real life became the hero of the stage as a matter of course. That he should have done well as Robin Hood may not be so very remarkable. But mannered comedy and tragic poetry are distinct techniques which Terriss never had mastered. Even if others had taken audiences by assault, though less astonishingly, in other generations, comparisons show that those who won fame in a night when Kean and Wallack laboured step by step, were invariably beautiful young women : handsome men could not do likewise until the rowdy, masculine and chivalrous pit was pushed into the background by the upholstered half-a-guinea, feminine stalls.
With his start in life as a midshipmite, his shipwreck and his terrible exposure, Terriss is the Jack Tar up to date. But he has altered. He is not jolly. He suffers a lot more, which is a sign that the century has