Dr. Furnivall, a great Shakespearean scholar, was so kind as to write me the following letter about Portia: 

“Being founder and director of the New Shakespeare Society, I venture to thank you most heartily for your most charming and admirable impersonation of our poet’s Portia, which I witnessed to-night with a real delight.  You have given me a new light on the character, and by your so pretty by-play in the Casket Scene have made bright in my memory for ever the spot which almost all critics have felt dull, and I hope to say this in a new edition of ‘Shakespeare.’”

(He did say it, in “The Leopold” edition.)

“Again those touches of the wife’s love in the advocate when Bassanio says he’d give up his wife for Antonio, and when you kissed your hand to him behind his back in the Ring bit—­how pretty and natural they were!  Your whole conception and acting of the character are so true to Shakespeare’s lines that one longs he could be here to see you.  A lady gracious and graceful, handsome, witty, loving and wise, you are his Portia to the life.”

That’s the best of Shakespeare, I say.  His characters can be interpreted in at least eight different ways, and of each way some one will say:  “That is Shakespeare!” The German actress plays Portia as a low comedy part.  She wears an eighteenth-century law wig, horn spectacles, a cravat (this last anachronism is not confined to Germans), and often a mustache!  There is something to be said for it all, though I should not like to play the part that way myself.

Lady Pollock, who first brought me to Henry Irving’s notice as a possible leading lady, thought my Portia better at the Lyceum than it had been at the Prince of Wales’s.

“Thanks, my dear Valentine and enchanting Portia,” she writes to me in response to a photograph that I had sent her, “but the photographers don’t see you as you are, and have not the poetry in them to do you justice....  You were especially admirable in the Casket Scene.  You kept your by-play quieter, and it gained in effect from the addition of repose—­and I rejoiced that you did not kneel to Bassanio at ‘My Lord, my governor, my King.’  I used to feel that too much like worship from any girl to her affianced, and Portia’s position being one of command, I should doubt the possibility of such an action....”

I think I received more letters about my Portia than about all my other parts put together.  Many of them came from university men.  One old playgoer wrote to tell me that he liked me better than my former instructress, Mrs. Charles Kean.  “She mouthed it as she did most things....  She was not real—­a staid, sentimental ‘Anglaise,’ and more than a little stiffly pokerish.”

Henry Irving’s Shylock was generally conceded to be full of talent and reality, but some of his critics could not resist saying that this was not the Jew that Shakespeare drew!  Now, who is in a position to say what is the Jew that Shakespeare drew?  I think Henry Irving knew as well as most!  Nay, I am sure that in his age he was the only person able to decide.