Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/88

ONCE A CLOWN, ALWAYS A CLOWN to himself over his own lines. Gilbert has done that to all of us.

I should have liked to know W. S. Gilbert, but I should not have cared to know him too well perhaps. All of his wit is not to be found in the operas. His friends, his neighbors and actors were victims of some of his sharpest shafts. There is the story of the rehearsal of "Pinafore" at which he directed Rutland Barrington, who played the captain, to sit pensively upon the skylight of the good ship. The actor sat down and the skylight collapsed beneath him.

"Pensively, Rutland, pensively—not expensively," the author chided.

It was Gilbert who when asked by Lady Tree how he had liked Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree's first venture in "Hamlet," replied, "It was funny without being vulgar, I thought." But my favorite Gilbertian anecdote is that of his rejoinder to the baronet, a partner in a house famous throughout the empire for its relishes, pickles, jams, jellies and preserves, who was a neighbor of Gilbert's in the country. The baronet had grown very touchy about the source of his wealth and his title, and was rather a hoity-toity neighbor.