His manners, even his voice, were half English, albeit he possessed a most engaging disposition--a ready tact and keen discernment, very un-English,--and these won him an efficient corps of claquers and backers throughout the newspapers and periodicals of the metropolis.

Thus his success was assured from the first.
The raw November evening when he opened at Egyptian Hall the room was crowded with an audience of literary men and women, great and small, from Swinburne and Edmund Yates to the trumpeters and reporters of the morning papers.

The next day most of these contained glowing accounts.
The Times was silent, but four days later The Thunderer, seeing how the wind blew, came out with a column of eulogy, and from this onward, each evening proved a kind of ovation.

Seats were engaged for a week in advance.

Up and down Piccadilly, from St.James Church to St.James Street, carriages bearing the first arms in the kingdom were parked night after night; and the evening of the 21st of December, six weeks after, there was no falling off.