“WILL TERRISS.”

I have never seen any one at all like Terriss, and my father said the same.  The only actor of my father’s day, he used to tell me, who had a touch of the same insouciance and lawlessness was Leigh Murray, a famous jeune premier.

One night he came into the theater soaked from head to foot.

“Is it raining, Terriss?” said some one who noticed that he was wet.

“Looks like it, doesn’t it?” said Terriss carelessly.

Later it came out that he had jumped off a penny steamboat into the Thames and saved a little girl’s life.  It was pretty brave, I think.

Mr. Pinero, who was no longer a member of the Lyceum company when “Much Ado” was produced, wrote to Henry after the first night that it was “as perfect a representation of a Shakespearean play as I conceive to be possible.  I think,” he added, “that the work at your theater does so much to create new playgoers—­which is what we want, far more I fancy than we want new theaters and perhaps new plays.”

A playgoer whose knowledge of the English stage extended over a period of fifty-five years, wrote another nice letter about “Much Ado” which was passed on to me because it had some ridiculously nice things about me in it.

SAVILE CLUB, January 13, 1883.

“My dear Henry,—­

“I were an imbecile ingrate if I did not hasten to give you my warmest thanks for the splendid entertainment of last night.  Such a performance is not a grand entertainment merely, or a glorious pastime, although it was all that.  It was, too, an artistic display of the highest character, elevating in the vast audience their art instinct—­as well as purifying any developed art in the possession of individuals.

“I saw the Kean revivals of 1855-57, and I suppose ‘The Winter’s Tale’ was the best of the lot.  But it did not approach last night....

“I was impressed more strongly than ever with the fact that the plays of Shakespeare were meant to be acted.  The man who thinks that he can know Shakespeare by reading him is a shallow ass.  The best critic and scholar would have been carried out of himself last night into the poet’s heart, his mind-spirit....  The Terry was glorious....  The scenes in which she appeared—­and she was in eight out of the sixteen—­reminded me of nothing but the blessed sun that not only beautifies but creates.  But she never acts so well as when I am there to see!  That is a real lover’s sentiment, and all lovers are vain men.

“Terriss has ‘come on’ wonderfully, and his Don Pedro is princely and manful.

“I have thus set down, my dear Irving, one or two things merely to show that my gratitude to you is not that of a blind gratified idiot, but of one whose intimate personal knowledge of the English stage entitles him to say what he owes to you.”

“I am

“Affectionately yours,

“A.J.  DUFFIELD.”