e piece, as a piece, and
regardless of his own acting, deserved better of the critics than
they were always willing to give it. Assuredly, no drama that ever was
written, as he played it, ever took such a hold upon the public. He
rendered it to three generations, and to a rising, not a falling,
popularity, drawing to the very last undiminished audiences.

Because of this unexampled run he was sometimes described by unthinking
people as a one-part actor. Nothing could be farther from the truth. He
possessed uncommon versatility. That after twenty years of the new Rip
Van Winkle, when he was past fifty years of age, he could come back to
such parts as Caleb Plummer and Acres is proof of this. He need not
have done so at all. Carrying a pension roll of dependents aggregating
fifteen or twenty thousand a year for more than a quarter of a century,
Rip would still have sufficed his requirements. It was his love for
his art that took him to The Cricket and The Rivals, and at no
inconsiderable cost to himself.

I have heard ill-natured persons, some of them envious actors, say that
he did nothing for the stage.

He certainly did not make many contributions to its upholstery. He was
in no position to emulate Sir Henry Irving in forcing and directing the
public taste. But he did in America quite as much as Sir Charles Wyndham
and Sir Henry Irving in England to elevate the personality, the social
and intellectual standing of the actor and the stage, effecting in a
lifetime a revolution in the attitude of the people and the clergy of
both countries to the theater and all things in it. This was surely
enough for one man in any craft or country.

He was always a good stage speaker. Late in life he began to speak
elsewhere, and finally to lecture. His success pleased him immensely.
The night of the Sunday afternoon charity for the Newsboys' Home in
Louisville, when the promise of a talk from him had filled the house to
overflowing, he was like a boy who had come off from a college occasion
with all the honors. Indeed, the degrees of Harvard and Yale, which had
reached him both unexpectedly and unsolicited, gave him a pleasure quite
apart from the vanity they might have gratified in another; he regarded
them, and justly, as the recognition at once of his profession and of
his personal character.

I never knew a man whose moral sensibilities were more acute. He loved
the respectable. He detested the unclean. He was just as attracti