me the wearied figure of
the Jew. This marked the passing of the time between Jessica's elopement
and Shylock's return home. It created an atmosphere of silence, and the
middle of the night.

"_You_ came back without dropping the curtain," said my daughter, "and
so it wasn't a bit the same."

"I couldn't risk dropping the curtain for the business," answered the
actor, "_because it needed applause to take it up again_!"

Henry Irving never grew tired of a part, never ceased to work at it,
just as he never gave up the fight against his limitations. His diction,
as the years went on, grew far clearer when he was depicting rage and
passion. His dragging leg dragged no more. To this heroic perseverance
he added an almost childlike eagerness in hearing any suggestion for the
improvement of his interpretations which commended itself to his
imagination and his judgment. From a blind man came the most
illuminating criticism of his Shylock. The sensitive ear of the
sightless hearer detected a fault in Henry Irving's method of delivering
the opening line of his part:

"Three thousand ducats--well!"

"I hear no sound of the usurer in that," the blind man said at the end
of the performance. "It is said with the reflective air of a man to whom
money means very little."

The justice of the criticism appealed strongly to Henry. He revised his
reading not only of the first line, but of many other lines in which he
saw now that he had not been enough of the money-lender.

In more recent years he made one change in his dress. He asked my
daughter--whose cleverness in such things he fully recognized--to put
some stage jewels on to the scarf that he wore round his head when he
supped with the Christians.

"I have an idea that, when he went to that supper, he'd like to flaunt
his wealth in the Christian dogs' faces. It will look well, too--'like
the toad, ugly and venomous,' wearing precious jewels on his head!"

The scarf, witnessing to that untiring love of throwing new light on his
impersonations which distinguished Henry to the last, is now in my
daughter's possession. She values no relic of him more unless it be the
wreath of oak-leaves that she made him for "Coriolanus."

We had a beautiful scene for this play--a garden with a dark pine forest
in the distance. Henry was _not_ good in it. He had a Romeo part which
had not been written by Shakespeare. We played it instead of the last
act of "The Merchant of Venice." I never l