“Sleepy!  Good heavens, no!  I never sleep more than two hours.  It’s the end of my life, and I don’t want to waste it in sleep!”

There is generally some “old ’un” in a company now who complains of insufficient rehearsals, and says, perhaps, “Think of Irving’s rehearsals!  They were the real thing.”  While we were rehearsing “Romeo and Juliet” I remember that Mrs. Stirling, a charming and ripe old actress whom Henry had engaged to play the nurse, was always groaning out that she had not rehearsed enough.

“Oh, these modern ways!” she used to say.  “We never have any rehearsals at all.  How am I going to play the Nurse?”

She played it splendidly—­indeed, she as the Nurse and old Tom Mead as the Apothecary—­the two “old ’uns” romped away with chief honors, had the play all to nothing.

I had one battle with Mrs. Stirling over “tradition.”  It was in the scene beginning—­

    “The clock struck twelve when I did send the nurse,
    And yet she is not here....”

Tradition said that Juliet must go on coquetting and clicking over the Nurse to get the news of Romeo out of her.  Tradition said that Juliet must give imitations of the Nurse on the line “Where’s your mother?” in order to get that cheap reward, “a safe laugh.”  I felt that it was wrong.  I felt that Juliet was angry with the Nurse.  Each time she delayed in answering I lost my temper, with genuine passion.  At “Where’s your mother?” I spoke with indignation, tears and rage.  We were a long time coaxing Mrs. Stirling to let the scene be played on these lines, but this was how it was played eventually.

She was the only Nurse that I have ever seen who did not play the part like a female pantaloon.  She did not assume any great decrepitude.  In the “Cords” scene, where the Nurse tells Juliet of the death of Paris, she did not play for comedy at all, but was very emotional.  Her parrot scream when she found me dead was horribly real and effective.

Years before I had seen Mrs. Stirling act at the Adelphi with Benjamin Webster, and had cried out:  “That’s my idea of an actress!” In those days she was playing Olivia (in a version of the “Vicar of Wakefield” by Tom Taylor), Peg Woffington, and other parts of the kind.  She swept on to the stage and in that magical way, never, never to be learned, filled it.  She had such breadth of style, such a lovely voice, such a beautiful expressive eye!  When she played the Nurse at the Lyceum her voice had become a little jangled and harsh, but her eye was still bright and her art had not abated—­not one little bit!  Nor had her charm.  Her smile was the most fascinating, irresistible thing imaginable.

The production was received with abuse by the critics.  It was one of our failures, yet it ran a hundred and fifty nights!

Henry Irving’s Romeo had more bricks thrown at it even than my Juliet!  I remember that not long after we opened, a well-known politician who had enough wit and knowledge of the theater to have taken a more original view, came up to me and said: