The Making of a Novelist by David Christie Murray

Amongst actors one finds some of the queerest people in the world. The men of the modern school are very much like other people; but the old stagers can still find some of their number who are as richly comical as Mr. Vincent Crummies himself. They are like the dyer's hand, subdued to what they work in. I was thrown a great deal into the society of one elderly young gentleman whose speciality had for years been that sort of high-flying rattling comedy of which Charles Mathews was the chief exponent in my youth. He had the most suasive, genial, and gentlemanly comedy manner conceivable, and was never for a minute away from the footlights. At breakfast, at luncheon, at dinner, he played to the public of the hotel coffee-room. In the street he played to his fellow-promenaders. He played, and played hard, in the simplest private conversation. He had no more sense of moral responsibility than a butterfly.

He was as admirable a stage liar, or nearly, as Mr. Hawtrey is; and off the stage he was as free from the trammels of veracity as he was when on it He could promise, explain, evade, as dexterously in his own person as in the character of Lord Oldacre or Greythorne or Hummingtop. The world to him was literally a stage, and all the men and women merely players. Old age will teach him no sadness. He will play at being old. Death will have none of its common terrors for him. He will play at dying. When last I heard of him I was told that he was very, very poor; but I am sure he suffers little. He is playing at making a fortune or playing at having lost one: pluming himself on some visionary splendour, or commiserating some picturesquely broken nobleman in his own person.