Tyars was the most useful actor that we ever had in the company.  I should think that the number of parts he has played in the same piece would constitute a theatrical record.

I don’t remember when Tom Mead first played the Duke, but I remember what happened!

     “Shylock, the world thinks, and I think so too.”

He began the speech in the Trial Scene very slowly.

Between every word Henry was whispering:  “Get on—­get on!” Old Mead, whose memory was never good, became flustered, and at the end of the line came to a dead stop.

“Get on, get on,” said Henry.

Mead looked round with dignity, opened his mouth and shut it, opened it again, and in his anxiety to oblige Henry, did get on indeed!—­to the last line of the long speech.

     “We all expect a gentle answer, Jew.”

The first line and the last line were all that we heard of the Duke’s speech that night.  It must have been the shortest version of it on record.

This was the play with which the Lyceum reopened in the autumn of 1880.  I was on the last of my provincial tours with Charles Kelly at the time, but I must have come up to see the revival, for I remember Henry Irving in it very distinctly.  He had not played the dual role of Louis and Fabien del Franchi before, and he had to compete with old playgoers’ memories of Charles Kean and Fechter.  Wisely enough he made of it a “period” play, emphasizing its old-fashioned atmosphere.  In 1891, when the play was revived, the D’Orsay costumes were noticed and considered piquant and charming.  In 1880 I am afraid they were regarded with indifference as merely antiquated.

The grace and elegance of Henry as the civilized brother I shall never forget.  There was something in him to which the perfect style of the D’Orsay period appealed, and he spoke the stilted language with as much truth as he wore the cravat and the tight-waisted full-breasted coats.  Such lines as—­

     “’Tis she!  Her footstep beats upon my heart!”

were not absurd from his lips.

The sincerity of the period, he felt, lay in its elegance.  A rough movement, a too undeliberate speech, and the absurdity of the thing might be given away.  It was in fact given away by Terriss at Chateau-Renaud, who was not the smooth, graceful, courteous villain that Alfred Wigan had been and that Henry wanted.  He told me that he paid Miss Fowler, an actress who in other respects was not very remarkable, an enormous salary because she could look the high-bred lady of elegant manners.

It was in “The Corsican Brothers” that tableau curtains were first used at the Lyceum.  They were made of red plush, which suited the old decoration of the theater.  Those who only saw the Lyceum after its renovation in 1881 do not realize perhaps that before that date it was decorated in dull gold and dark crimson, and had funny boxes with high fronts like old-fashioned church pews.  One of these boxes was rented annually by the Baroness Burdett-Coutts.  It was rather like the toy cardboard theater which children used to be able to buy for sixpence.  The effect was somber, but I think I liked it better than the cold, light, shallow, bastard Pompeian decoration of later days.