But no less natural than this progress of his technical evolution has been that of his mental one. In the course of this how could he well escape the Shakespeare cycle; not only because he had begun by interpreting old English poems and plays, and it was only a question of time as to when he would feel the influence of the poet-dramatist, but also because his imagination is of the dramatic kind. He would have made an ideal stage manager of the highest type. As I have said, it is less by any originality of conception that his imagination is distinguished than by an aptitude for grasping the thought of another, reclothing it with actuality, setting it in its appropriate environment, and making it breathe again with the spirit of its time. But such a gift, on the stage at least, is rarely, if ever, accompanied by personal histrionic ability. It is a gift, of selecting, assembling, and combining, rather than of absorption of self in a given line of motive. The stage manager gives the appearance of life to a scene, the actor makes it live, and I wonder whether it be not true that in these Shakespearian canvases of Abbey’s and in his mural decorations of the Holy Grail in the Boston Public Library there is a marshalling of the scene without the dramatic force. Do they carry us away and fill us with the emotion that we should receive in presence of the play well acted on the stage or in the reading of the legend intelligently? We find ourselves, I believe, rather studying the parts of those elaborate productions, the accuracy and beauty of detail, admiring the manipulative ability that has collected and coördinated, and waiting, meanwhile, for the drama to begin. And if this is true, may it not be the result of choosing for pictorial representation a subject of such complex emotions as the player’s scene in “Hamlet,” or one of such almost inexplicable subtlety as Richard’s love advances to Anne as she follows in the funeral procession of her dead husband, or even one of comparatively directer significance as that of “The Penance of Eleanor”? In his last picture, the “Trial of Queen Katherine,” he has not attempted to portray the climax of the scene, but the first pathetic pleading of the “most poor woman.” Surely he did well to seize for representation this intermediate movement in the scene. He has gained thereby our human sympathy for a subject which might easily have been too complicated with highly strung emotions to be immediately intelligible. And it is one of the merits of this picture that its appeal is not only impressive but immediate. He has exhibited a tactful modesty, and I use the word with a thought of its real meaning, which is something choicer than moderation. He might have attempted a more heroic note, pitched it to the extreme possibility of the scene. But he avoids a _tour de force_; and draws us as much by persuasion as by strength; by the strength, in fact, of what he holds in reserve.