“Ever yours affectionately,

“E.B.-J.

“—­I wish that Cardinal could have been made Pope, and sat with his foot on the Earl of Surrey’s neck.  Also I wish to be a Cardinal; but then I sometimes want to be a pirate.  We can’t have all we want.

“Your boy was very kind—­I thought the race of young men who are polite and attentive to old fading ones had passed away with antique pageants—­but it isn’t so.”

When the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire gave the famous fancy dress ball at Devonshire House, Henry attended it in the robes which had appealed so strongly to Burne-Jones’s imaginative eye.  I was told by one who was present at this ball that as the Cardinal swept up the staircase, his long train held magnificently over his arm, a sudden wave of reality seemed to sweep upstairs with him, and reduce to the prettiest make-believe all the aristocratic masquerade that surrounded him.

I renewed my acquaintance with “Henry VIII.” in 1902, when I played Queen Katherine for Mr. Benson during the Shakespeare Memorial performances in April.  I was pretty miserable at the time—­the Lyceum reign was dying, and taking an unconscionably long time about it, which made the position all the more difficult.  Henry Irving was reviving “Faust”—­a wise step, as it had been his biggest “money-maker”—­and it was impossible that I could play Margaret.  There are some young parts that the actress can still play when she is no longer young:  Beatrice, Portia, and many others come to mind.  But I think that when the character is that of a young girl the betrayal of whose innocence is the main theme of the play, no amount of skill on the part of the actress can make up for the loss of youth.

Suggestions were thrown out to me (not by Henry Irving, but by others concerned) that although I was too old for Margaret, I might play Martha!  Well! well!  I didn’t quite see that.  So I redeemed a promise given in jest at the Lyceum to Frank Benson twenty years earlier, and went off to Stratford-upon-Avon to play in Henry VIII.

Mr. Benson was wonderful to work with.  “I am proud to think,” he wrote me just before our few rehearsals began, “that I have trained my folk (as I was taught by my elders and betters at the Lyceum) to be pretty quick at adapting themselves to anything that may be required of them, so that you need not be uneasy as to their not fitting in with your business.”

“My folk,” as Mr. Benson called them, were excellent, especially Surrey (Harcourt Williams), Norfolk (Matheson Lang), Caperius (Fitzgerald), and Griffith (Nicholson).  “Harcourt Williams,” I wrote in my diary on the day of the dress-rehearsal, “will be heard of very shortly.  He played Edgar in ‘Lear’ much better than Terriss, although not so good an actor yet.”

I played Katherine on Shakespeare’s Birthday—­such a lovely day, bright and sunny and warm.  The performance went finely—­and I made a little speech afterwards which was quite a success.  I was presented publicly on the stage with the Certificate of Governorship of the Memorial Theater.