e watching
Napoleon trying to imitate H.I., and I find myself immensely interested
and amused in the watchings."

"The Medicine Man" was, in my opinion, our only _quite_ unworthy
production.

_From my Diary._--"Poor Taber has such an awful part in the play,
and mine is even worse. It is short enough, yet I feel I can't cut
too much of it.... The gem of the whole play is my hair! Not waved
at all, and very filmy and pale. Henry, I admit, is splendid; but
oh, it is all such rubbish!... If 'Manfred' and a few such plays
are to succeed this, I simply must do something else."

But I did not! I stayed on, as every one knows, when the Lyceum as a
personal enterprise of Henry's was no more--when the farcical Lyceum
Syndicate took over the theater. I played a wretched part in
"Robespierre," and refused L12,000 to go to America with Henry in
"Dante."

In these days Henry was a changed man. He became more republican and
less despotic as a producer. He left things to other people. As an actor
he worked as faithfully as ever. Henley's stoical lines might have been
written of him as he was in these last days:

"Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods there be
For my unconquerable soul.

"In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud:
Beneath the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody but unbowed."

Henry Irving did not treat me badly. I hope I did not treat him badly.
He revived "Faust" and produced "Dante." I would have liked to stay with
him to the end of the chapter, but there was nothing for me to act in
either of these plays. But we never quarreled. Our long partnership
dissolved naturally. It was all very sad, but it could not be helped.

It has always been a reproach against Henry Irving in some mouths that
he neglected the modern English playwright; and of course the reproach
included me to a certain extent. I was glad, then, to show
that I _could_ act in the new plays when Mr. Barrie wrote
"Alice-sit-by-the-Fire" for me, and after some years' delay I was able
to play in Mr. Bernard Shaw's "Captain Brassbound's Conversion." Of
course I could not have played in "little" plays of this school at the
Lyceum with Henry Irving, even if I had wanted to! They are essentially
plays for small theaters.

In Mr. Shaw's "A Man of Destiny" there were two good parts, and Henry,
at my reques