As A Lifelong Lover Of The Drama And A Boyish Friend Of Granadan
Romance, I Ought To Have Cared More For The Play Than The People Who Had
Come To It, But I Did Not.
The play was unintentionally amusing enough;
but after listening for two hours to the monotonous cadences of the
speeches
Which the persons of it recited to one another, while the
ladies of the Moorish world took as public a part in its events as if
they had been so many American Christians, we came away. We had already
enjoyed the first entr'acte, when the men all rose and went out, or
lighted fresh cigars and went to talk with the Paris hats and plumes or
the Spanish mantillas and high combs in the boxes. The curtain had
scarcely fallen when the author of the play was called before it and
applauded by the generous, the madly generous, spectators. He stood
bowing and bowing on tiptoe, as if the wings of his rapture lifted him
to them and would presently fly away with him. He could not drink deep
enough of the delicious draught, put brimming to his lips, and the
divine intoxication must have lasted him through the night, for after
breakfast the next morning I met him in our common corridor at the hotel
smiling to himself, and when I could not forbear smiling in return he
smiled more; he beamed, he glowed upon me as if I were a crowded house
still cheering him to the echo.
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