It was Heywood who inquired if I remembered another of Irving's plays at the close of which a second greatly misjudged character had appealed for sympathy by adopting the same pose. Of course I did--I remembered it very distinctly. It was in _Peter the Great_, that the actor, waiting with sublime resignation to hear the heart-rending death-shriek of his son whom he had condemned to drink a cup of cold poison, is told by a hurrying messenger that his illegitimate child has just died--then came the hideous shriek, and the actor, with his far-away look of patient anguish, spoke his words,-- “Then I am childless!” And the curtain fell. He appealed for sympathy on precisely the same grounds as were suggested by the prisoner at the bar who had killed his father with a hatchet, and on being convicted by the jury and asked by the judge if he could advance any plea whereby the sentence of death should not be pronounced upon him, said he hoped that his lordship would not forget that he was an orphan. In this drama the first act was played with as much jingling of sleigh-bells as took place in another and rather better known piece in the repertoire of the same actor. But whatever were its shortcomings, _Peter the Great_ showed that poor Lawrence Irving could write, and write well, and that he might one day give to the English theatre a great drama. Irving was accused of neglecting English authors; but the accusation was quite unjust. He gave several of them a chance. There was, of course, W. G. Wills, who was a true dramatist, and showed it in those plays to which I have referred. But it must not be forgotten that he produced a play by Mr. H. D. Traill and Mr. Robert Hitchens, and another by Herman Merrivale; Mr. J. Comyns Carr took in hand the finishing of _King Arthur_, begun by Wills, and made it ridiculous, and helped in translating and adapting _Madame Sans Gêne_. Might not Lord Tennyson also be called an English author? and were not his three plays, _Queen Mary, The Cup, and Bechet_ brought out at the Lyceum? Irving showed me how he had made the last-named playable, and I confess that I was astonished. There was not a single page of the book remaining untouched when he had done with it. Speech after speech was transferred from one act to another, and the sequence of the scenes was altered, before the drama was made possible. But when he had finished with it _Bechet_ was not only possible and playable, it was the noblest and the best constructed drama in verse that the stage had seen for years. I asked him what Lord Tennyson had said about this chopping and changing; but he did not give me a verbatim account of the poet's greeting of his offspring in its stage dress--he only smiled as one smiles under the influence of a reminiscence of something that is better over.