See him in “The Merchant of Venice.”  His Shylock is noble and sordid, pathetic and terrifying.  It is one of his great parts, made up of pride, stealth, anger, minute and varied picturesqueness, and a diabolical subtlety.  Whether he paws at his cloak, or clutches upon the handle of his stick, or splutters hatred, or cringes before his prey, or shakes with lean and wrinkled laughter, he is always the great part and the great actor.  See him as Mephistopheles in “Faust.”  The Lyceum performance was a superb pantomime, with one overpowering figure drifting through it and in some sort directing it, the red-plumed devil Mephistopheles, who, in Sir Henry Irving’s impersonation of him, becomes a kind of weary spirit, a melancholy image of unhappy pride, holding himself up to the laughter of inferior beings, with the old acknowledgment that “the devil is an ass.”  A head like the head of Dante, shown up by coloured lights, and against chromolithographic backgrounds, while all the diabolic intelligence is set to work on the cheap triumph of wheedling a widow and screwing Rhenish and Tokay with a gimlet out of an inn table:  it is partly Goethe’s fault, and partly the fault of Wills, and partly the lowering trick of the stage.  Mephistopheles is not really among Irving’s great parts, but it is among his picturesque parts.  With his restless strut, a blithe and aged tripping of the feet to some not quite human measure, he is like some spectral marionette, playing a game only partly his own.  In such a part no mannerism can seem unnatural, and the image with its solemn mask lives in a kind of galvanic life of its own, seductively, with some mocking suggestion of his “cousin the snake.”  Here and there some of the old power may be lacking; but whatever was once subtle and insinuating remains.

Shakespeare at the Lyceum is always a magnificent spectacle, and “Coriolanus,” the last Shakespearean revival there, was a magnificent spectacle.  It is a play made up principally of one character and a crowd, the crowd being a sort of moving background, treated in Shakespeare’s large and scornful way.  A stage crowd at the Lyceum always gives one a sense of exciting movement, and this Roman rabble did all that was needed to show off the almost solitary splendour of Coriolanus.  He is the proudest man in Shakespeare, and Sir Henry Irving is at his best when he embodies pride.  His conception of the part was masterly; it had imagination, nobility, quietude.  With opportunity for ranting in every second speech, he never ranted, but played what might well have been a roaring part with a kind of gentleness.  With every opportunity for extravagant gesture, he stood, as the play seemed to foam about him, like a rock against which the foam beats.  Made up as a kind of Roman Moltke, the lean, thoughtful soldier, he spoke throughout with a slow, contemptuous enunciation, as of one only just not too lofty to sneer.  Restrained in scorn, he kept throughout an attitude of disdainful