It was painful in the extreme to see the man who was undergoing tortures behind the curtain step lightly before the audience amid a burst of merriment, and for more than an hour sustain the part of jester, tossing his cap and jingling his bells, a painted death's head, for he had to rouge his face to hide the pallor.
His buoyancy forsook him.

He was occasionally nervous and fretful.

The fog, he declared, felt like a winding sheet, enwrapping and strangling him.

At one of his entertainments he made a grim, serio-comic allusion to this.

"But," cried he as he came off the stage, "that was not a hit, was it?
The English are scary about death.