fashioned house near Kennington
Church, and died at a great age. He has a descendant on the stage in Mr.
Ben Webster, who acted with us at the Lyceum, and is now well known both
in England and America.

Henry Compton's son, Edward, was in this performance of "Money." He was
engaged to the beautiful Adelaide Neilson, an actress whose brilliant
career was cut off suddenly when she was riding in the Bois. She drank a
glass of milk when she was overheated, was taken ill, and died. I am
told that she commanded L700 a week in America, and in England people
went wild over her Juliet. She looked like a child of the warm South,
although she was born, I think, in Manchester, and her looks were much
in her favor as Juliet. She belonged to the ripe, luscious, pomegranate
type of woman. The only living actress with the same kind of beauty is
Maxine Elliott.

Adelaide Neilson had a short reign, but a most triumphant one. It was
easy to understand it when one saw her. She was so gracious, so
feminine, so lovely. She did things well, but more from instinct than
anything else. She had no science. Edward Compton now takes his own
company round the provinces in an excellent repertoire of old comedies.
He has done as much to make country audiences familiar with them as Mr.
Benson has done to make them familiar with Shakespeare.

I come now to the Lyceum rehearsals of November, 1878. Although Henry
Irving had played Hamlet for over two hundred nights in London, and for
I don't know how many nights in the provinces, he always rehearsed in
cloak and rapier. This careful attention to detail came back to my mind
years afterwards, when he gave readings of Macbeth. He never gave a
public reading without first going through the entire play at home--at
home, that is to say, in a miserably uncomfortable hotel.

During the first rehearsal he read every one's part except mine, which
he skipped, and the power that he put into each part was extraordinary.
He threw himself so thoroughly into it that his skin contracted and his
eyes shone. His lips grew whiter and whiter, and his skin more and more
drawn as the time went on, until he looked like a livid thing, but
beautiful.

He never got at anything _easily_, and often I felt angry that he would
waste so much of his strength in trying to teach people to do things in
the right way. Very often it only ended in his producing actors who gave
colorless, feeble and unintelligent imitations of him. There w