Stoker and Loveday were daily, nay, hourly, associated for many years with Henry Irving; but, after all, did they or any one else really know him?  And what was Henry Irving’s attitude.  I believe myself that he never wholly trusted his friends, and never admitted them to his intimacy, although they thought he did, which was the same thing to them.

From his childhood up, Henry was lonely.  His chief companions in youth were the Bible and Shakespeare.  He used to study “Hamlet” in the Cornish fields, when he was sent out by his aunt, Mrs. Penberthy, to call in the cows.  One day, when he was in one of the deep, narrow lanes common in that part of England, he looked up and saw the face of a sweet little lamb gazing at him from the top of the bank.  The symbol of the lamb in the Bible had always attracted him, and his heart went out to the dear little creature.  With some difficulty he scrambled up the bank, slipping often in the damp, red earth, threw his arms round the lamb’s neck and kissed it.

The lamb bit him!

Did this set-back in early childhood influence him?  I wonder!  He had another such set-back when he first went on the stage, and for some six weeks in Dublin was subjected every night to groans, hoots, hisses, and cat-calls from audiences who resented him because he had taken the place of a dismissed favorite.  In such a situation an actor is not likely to take stock of reasons.  Henry Irving only knew that the Dublin people made him the object of violent personal antipathy.  “I played my parts not badly for me,” he said simply, “in spite of the howls of execration with which I was received.”

The bitterness of this Dublin episode was never quite forgotten.  It colored Henry Irving’s attitude towards the public.  When he made his humble little speeches of thanks to them before the curtain, there was always a touch of pride in the humility.  Perhaps he would not have received adulation in quite the same dignified way if he had never known what it was to wear the martyr’s “shirt of flame.”

This is the worst of my trying to give a consecutive narrative of my first years at the Lyceum.  Henry Irving looms across them, reducing all events, all feelings, all that happened, and all that was suggested, to pigmy size.

Let me speak generally of his method of procedure in producing a play.

First he studied it for three months himself, and nothing in that play would escape him.  Some one once asked him a question about “Titus Andronicus.”  “God bless my soul!” he said.  “I never read it, so how should I know!” The Shakespearean scholar who had questioned him was a little shocked—­a fact which Henry Irving, the closest observer of men, did not fail to notice.

“When I am going to do ‘Titus Andronicus,’ or any other play,” he said to me afterwards, “I shall know more about it than A——­ or any other student.”