ath,
and to make the royalty gleam through the angry darkness, were the
problems, and Mr. Irving solved them one and all, even with redundance
of faculty and skill. At the end of the heath scene the man is more
remembered than the storm. It has been objected that in the first scene
Mr. Irving's _Lear_ is too old and feeble. I venture to think otherwise.
I further venture to think that the King's age and the King's imbecility
have both been accurately appreciated. A man at eighty, a man athirst
for flattery, a man who would pay a kingdom in exchange for adulation,
must have outlived all that is best and strongest in human nature. He
comes upon the stage as a wreck. His vanity has eaten up his sagacity,
so that she, _Goneril_ or _Regan_, who can flatter most, can lie most,
and can play the devil best, shall fare most lavishly at his hands. Is
it not well partly to excuse these excesses of self-valuation by such
mitigations as can be found in the infirmity of old age? Even in an
elderly man they would have been treated with contempt; they could only
be endured in one whose eighty years had been doubled by the hardness of
his life lot.

In "Henry VIII." Mr. Irving had little to do. In that play the labour
and the glory fell upon another, to the infinite delight of the public.
In "Lear," Mr. Irving has everything to do. From beginning to end there
is only one character. Even the fascinating _Cordelia_ is but a silver
cloud on the far horizon. "The King is coming" is the cry of the play.
His madness is more, as to display and effect, than the sense of all the
others. The scene is stiff and cold until his wild hair is observed to
approach the front, and then the whole spectacle is alight with feeling
and purpose. The other actors are not to blame that, to a large extent,
they are thrown into the shade; indeed, they are to be warmly
congratulated upon their self-suppression and their passive sympathy. It
is a hard task to play the part of two heartless and treacherous
daughters, and a pitiful fate to have to represent the villainy of
_Edmund_, yet all this was admirably done. It cannot be an easy thing to
come forward to play the villain well, for the better the dramatic
villain is played the more is the actor compelled to recognise in his
execration the exact degree of his success. So admirably can Mr. Irving
himself play the villain, that it is difficult to believe that any
godparents ever, on his unconscious behalf, renounce