' He was ' (says his old friend, R. C. Browne) 'a delightful -com-
panion at the theatre. His society gave a keener, more subtle
relish to those pleasures — his attitude was that of quiet expect-
ancy, not anticipating but receiving what might come, thoroughly
ready to enjoy it, but steadily referring all that claimed accept-
ance or admiration to that calm, inexorable judgment of his. He
had an alert perception of the absurd. He detected it under
however imposing or brilliant a disguise. On the first night of
the Winter^t Tale, when Charles Kean dazsled the town with the
contrasting splendour of Magna Graecia and Bithynia — ^into which
Shakespeare's Bohemia was for the nonce transformed — he refused
to allow the pomp and pageantry to conceal from him the thin
and ragged poverty of the dramatic presentment. When " Time
as Chorus " suggested the enquiry :

' ** If ever you have spent time worse ere now," he remarked
ioUo voce, " Hardly ever, I think."

^ ' BCadmme Joachim's tinging of Schumann's ** Sonntags am Rhdn " wis one
of the most touching incidents of the Festival,' wis Ainger's own note appended
to these lines.
