Robert Taber, dear, and rather sad too, was a great friend of Joe’s.  They both came to me first in the shape of a little book in which was inscribed, “Never anything can be amiss when simpleness and duty tender it.”  “Upon this hint I spake,” the book began.  It was all the work of a few boys and girls who from the gallery of the Star Theater, New York, had watched Irving’s productions and learned to love him and me.  Joe Evans had done a lovely picture by way of frontispiece of a group of eager heads hanging over the gallery’s edge, his own and Taber’s among them.  Eventually Taber came to England and acted with Henry Irving in “Peter the Great” and other plays.

Like his friend Joe, he too was heroic.  His health was bad and his life none too happy—­but he struggled on.  His career was cut short by consumption, and he died in the Adirondacks in 1904.

I cannot speak of all my friends in America, or anywhere, for the matter of that, individually.  My personal friends are so many, and they are all wonderful—­wonderfully staunch to me!  I have “tried” them so, and they have never given me up as a bad job.

My first friends of all in America were Mr. Bayard, afterwards the American Ambassador in London, and his sister, Mrs. Benoni Lockwood, her husband and their children.  Now after all these years they are still my friends, and I can hope for none better to the end.

William Winter, poet, critic and exquisite man, was one of the first to write of Henry with whole-hearted appreciation.  But all the criticism in America, favorable and unfavorable, surprised us by the scholarly knowledge it displayed.  In Chicago the notices were worthy of the Temps or the Journal des Debats.  There was no attempt to force the personality of the writer into the foreground nor to write a style that should attract attention to the critic and leave the thing criticized to take care of itself.  William Winter, and, of late years, Allan Dale, have had their personalities associated with their criticisms, but they are exceptions.  Curiously enough the art of acting appears to bore most dramatic critics, the very people who might be expected to be interested in it.  The American critics, however, at the time of our early visits, were keenly interested, and showed it by their observation of many points which our English critics had passed over.  For instance, writing of “Much Ado about Nothing,” one of the Americans said of Henry in the Church Scene that “something of him as a subtle interpreter of doubtful situations was exquisitely shown in the early part of this fine scene by his suspicion of Don John—­felt by him alone, and expressed only by a quick covert look, but a look so full of intelligence as to proclaim him a sharer in the secret with his audience.”