Page:Appreciations of Horace Howard Furness.djvu/38

 30 plays, and his enthusiasm awoke, never to sleep again. It was as a listener, not as a student, that he received his most powerful and durable impressions. To this early influence was due, in large measure, the preservation of the dramatic feeling through a long life of patient and laborious research.

From Fanny Kemble, too, came the gift of Shakespeare's stage gloves, most precious and most honored of relics. Their history is a notable one. In 1746 they were presnted by William Shakespeare, a poor glazier, 'whose father and our poet were brothers' children,' to John Ward, when that generous actor played Othello at Stratford-on-Avon, and devoted the night's receipts to repairing Shakespeare's monument in the church. John Ward, with a sense of fitness as pleasing as it is rare, gave these gloves in 1769 to David Garrick, who bequeathed them to his widow, who bequeathed them to Mrs. Siddons, who bequeathed them to her daughter, Cecilia, who gave them to Fanny Kemble, who gave them to Dr. Furness in 1874. It is not often, in these days of millionaire collectors, that the right things belong to the right people so consistently and persistently as have these worn gauntlets.

Dr. Furness's power of sustained labor seemed well-nigh miraculous to a generation which stands forever in need of rest and change of scene. For forty years he worked on an average ten