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By this time the Paladin, who had gone away for a moment with the opening of the poem, was back again, and had stepped within the door. He stood there now, resting his great frame against the wall and gazing toward the reciter like one entranced.
For an ordinary room-slave Silius, or his agent for him, has paid perhaps £20; for a servant of more special skill, such as a particularly soft-handed barber, perhaps £50; the price of a muleteer who was "too deaf to overhear private conversation in a carriage" might thereby be enhanced to £150; for a slave with educational or artistic accomplishments a good reader, reciter, secretary, musician, or actor he may have paid some hundreds.
Even this was the feat that regenerate one, aided by his sacred fire, that silent reciter of Mantras, that one clad in deer-skins, accomplished! Behold, O royal sage, that act achieved by that Rishi who subsisted upon fruits only! I have thus narrated to thee, in detail, the feat of the high-souled Atri. Shall I go on? Or, will you say anything?
At breakfast on his first morning, he strikes the first blow casually helping himself to scrambled eggs the while, with the air of a man uttering some agreeable commonplace. "I say," he remarks, "why not get up some theatricals?" Eve, in the person of some young lady who would be a drawing-room reciter if drawing-room reciters were allowed nowadays, snatches at the apple. "Oh, yes," she says.
His recitals were amusing in themselves to Sir Thomas, but the chief object in seeking them was to understand the reciter, to know the young man by his histories; and he listened to his clear, simple, spirited details with full satisfaction, seeing in them the proof of good principles, professional knowledge, energy, courage, and cheerfulness, everything that could deserve or promise well.
"He never came a wink too soon, Nor brought too long a day; But now" continued the reciter with a great amount of pathos, "I often wish the night Had bawn my breath away!" "So do I," mumbled Paterson. "Let's have another song." "I remembah, I remembah, The roses, red and white "
He talks in his penetrating and garrulous way, 'sometimes for children and sometimes for philosophers, as Gibbon puts it, about everything in the world; but at the end of his book you find that he has not opened his heart on this subject. No doubt his profession as a reciter and story-teller prevented him.
'Narrer, reciter, declamer bien', are serious studies among them, and well deserve to be so everywhere. The conversations, even among the women, frequently turn upon the elegancies and minutest delicacies of the French language. And men, as well as women, are taken by those external graces.
Had mine been the task to speak these lines, I must inevitably have failed to get the required response, but in the mouth of the regular reciter they never once missed fire. This was Mr. Barry Aylmer. He afterwards adopted the stage as a profession, and became recognised as a very fine actor, chiefly in Irish parts, as might be expected.
'I am not a particularly melodious reciter. He vowed he could listen to her eternally, eternally. His face, on a screw of the neck and shoulders, was now perpetually three- quarters fronting. Ah! she was going to leave. 'Yes, and you will find my return quite early enough, said Diana, stepping a trifle more briskly. His fist was raised on the length of the arm, as if in invocation.
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