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."

There was no conceit in this. It was just a statement of fact. And it
may not have been an admirable quality of Henry Irving's, but all his
life he only took an interest in the things which concerned the work
that he had in hand. When there was a question of his playing Napoleon,
his room at Grafton Street was filled with Napoleonic literature. Busts
of Napoleon, pictures of Napoleon, relics of Napoleon were everywhere.
Then, when another play was being prepared, the busts, however fine,
would probably go down to the cellar. It was not _Napoleon_ who
interested Henry Irving, but _Napoleon for his purpose_--two very
different things.

His concentration during his three months' study of the play which he
had in view was marvelous. When, at the end of the three-months, he
called the first rehearsal, he read the play exactly as it was going to
be done on the first night. He knew exactly by that time what he
personally was going to do on the first night, and the company did well
to notice how he read his own part, for never again until the first
night, though he rehearsed with them, would he show his conception so
fully and completely.

These readings, which took place sometimes in the greenroom or Beefsteak
Room at the Lyceum, sometimes at his house in Grafton Street, were
wonderful. Never were the names of the characters said by the reader,
but never was there the slightest doubt as to which was speaking. Henry
Irving swiftly, surely, acted every part in the piece as he read. W