He had it all in him when we acted together that foggy night, but he could express very little.  Many of his defects sprang from his not having been on the stage as a child.  He was stiff with self-consciousness; his eyes were dull and his face heavy.  The piece we played was Garrick’s boiled-down version of “The Taming of the Shrew,” and he, as Petruchio, appreciated the humor and everything else far more than I did, as Katherine; yet he played badly, nearly as badly as I did; and how much more to blame I was, for I was at this time much more easy and skillful from a purely technical point of view.

Was Henry Irving impressive in those days?  Yes and no.  His fierce and indomitable will showed itself in his application to his work.  Quite unconsciously I learned from watching him that to do work well, the artist must spend his life in incessant labor, and deny himself everything for that purpose.  It is a lesson we actors and actresses cannot learn too early, for the bright and glorious heyday of our success must always be brief at best.

Henry Irving, when he played Petruchio, had been toiling in the provinces for eleven solid years, and not until Rawdon Scudamore in “Hunted Down” had he had any success.  Even that was forgotten in his failure as Petruchio.  What a trouncing he received from the critics who have since heaped praise on many worse men!

I think this was the peculiar quality in his acting afterwards—­a kind of fine temper, like the purest steel, produced by the perpetual fight against difficulties.  Socrates, it is said, had every capacity for evil in his face, yet he was good as a naturally good man could never be.  Henry Irving at first had everything against him as an actor.  He could not speak, he could not walk, he could not look.  He wanted to do things in a part, and he could not do them.  His amazing power was imprisoned, and only after long and weary years did he succeed in setting it free.

A man with a will like that must be impressive!  To quick-seeing eyes he must, no doubt.  But my eyes were not quick, and they were, moreover, fixed on a world outside the theater.  Better than his talent and his will I remember his courtesy.  In those days, instead of having our salaries brought to our dressing-rooms, we used to wait in a queue on Treasury Day to receive them.  I was always late in coming, and always in a hurry to get away.  Very gravely and quietly Henry Irving used to give up his place to me.

I played once more at the Queen’s after Katherine and Petruchio.  It was in a little piece called “The Household Fairy,” and I remember it chiefly through an accident which befell poor Jack Clayton through me.  The curtain had fallen on “The Household Fairy,” and Clayton, who had acted with me in it, was dancing with me on the stage to the music which was being played during the wait, instead of changing his dress for the next piece.  This dancing during the entr’acte was very popular