budge an inch in the reading of it, for that I know is right. Oh,
it's fun, but it's precious hard work, for I by no means make her
a gentle lovable woman' as some of 'em say. That's all pickles.
She was nothing of the sort, although she was _not_ a fiend, and
_did_ love her husband. I have to what is vulgarly called 'sweat
at it,' each night."

_Burne-Jones at "Macbeth"_

[Illustration: MISS ELLEN TERRY

FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN ON HER LAST TOUR IN AMERICA
_Copyrighted, 1907 by Helen Lohman_]

The few people who liked my Lady Macbeth, liked it very much. I hope I
am not vain to quote this letter from Lady Pollock:

"... Burne-Jones has been with me this afternoon: he was at
'Macbeth' last night, and you filled his whole soul with your
beauty and your poetry.... He says you were a great Scandinavian
queen, that your presence, your voice, your movement, made a
marvelously poetic harmony, that your dress was grandly imagined
and grandly worn--and that he cannot criticise--he can only
remember."

[Illustration: SIR HENRY IRVING

FROM A PORTRAIT GIVEN BY HIM TO MISS EVELYN SMALLEY IN 1896]

But Burne-Jones by this time had become one of our most ardent
admirers, and was prejudiced in my favour because my acting appealed
to his _eye_. Still the drama is for the eye as well as for the ear
and the mind.

"_The Dead Heart_"

Very early I learned that one had best be ambitious merely to please
oneself in one's work a little--quietly I coupled with this the
reflection that one "gets nothing for nothing, and damned little for
sixpence!"

Here I was in the very noonday of my life, fresh from Lady Macbeth and
still young enough to play Rosalind, suddenly called upon to play a
rather uninteresting mother in "The Dead Heart." However, my son Teddy
made his first appearance in it, and had such a big success that I
soon forgot that for me the play was rather "small beer."

It had been done before, of course, by Benjamin Webster and George
Vining. Henry engaged Bancroft for the Abbe, a part of quite as much
importance as his own. It was only a melodrama, but Henry could always
invest a melodrama with life, beauty, interest, mystery, by his
methods of production.

"I'm full of French Revolution," he wrote to me when he was
preparing the play for rehearsal, "and could pass an examination.
In our play at the taking of the Bastille, we must have a starving
crowd--hungry, eager, cadave