“God bless me, I must think....  It must have been about a year after Her Majesty took the throne.”

For forty years and nine months old Mr. Howe had acted at the Haymarket Theater!  When he was first there, the theater was lighted with oil lamps, and when a lamp smoked or went out, one of the servants of the theater came on and lighted it up again during the action of the play.

It was the acting of Edmund Kean in “Richard III.” which first filled Daddy Howe with the desire to go on the stage.  He saw the great actor again when he was living in retirement at Richmond—­in those last sad days when the Baroness Burdett-Coutts (then the rich young heiress, Miss Angela Burdett-Coutts), driving up the hill, saw him sitting huddled up on one of the public seats and asked if she could do anything for him.

“Nothing, I think,” he answered sadly.  “Ah yes, there is one thing.  You were kind enough the other day to send me some very excellent brandy. Send me some more."[1]

[Footnote 1:  This was a favorite story of Henry Irving’s, and for that reason alone I think it worth telling, although Sir Squire Bancroft assures me that stubborn dates make it impossible that the tale should be true.]

Of Henry Irving as an actor Mr. Howe once said to me that at first he was prejudiced against him because he was so different from the other great actors that he had known.

“‘This isn’t a bit like Iago,’ I said to myself when I first saw him in ‘Othello.’  That was at the end of the first act.  But he had commanded my attention to his innovations.  In the second act I found myself deeply interested in watching and studying the development of his conception.  In the third act I was fascinated by his originality.  By the end of the play I wondered that I could ever have thought that the part ought to be played differently.”

Daddy Howe was the first member of the Lyceum company who got a reception from the audience on his entrance as a public favorite.  He remained with us until his death, which took place on our fourth American tour in 1893.

Every one has commended Henry Irving’s kindly courtesy in inviting Edwin Booth to come and play with him at the Lyceum Theater.  Booth was having a wretched season at the Princess’s, which was when he went there a theater on the down-grade, and under a thoroughly commercial management.  The great American actor, through much domestic trouble and bereavement, had more or less “given up” things.  At any rate he had not the spirit which can combat such treatment as he received at the Princess’s, where the pieces in which he appeared were “thrown” on to the stage with every mark of assumption that he was not going to be a success.

Yet, although he accepted with gratitude Henry Irving’s suggestion that he should migrate from the Princess’s to the Lyceum and appear there three times a week as Othello with the Lyceum company and its manager to support him, I cannot be sure that Booth’s pride was not more hurt by this magnificent hospitality than it ever could have been by disaster.  It is always more difficult to receive than to give.