In private or social life, no matter how select or distinguished the surroundings or attractive the company, she eclipses every lady present, and is always the centre of attraction. No better estimate of the genius of Miss Terry can be given than Mr. William Winter’s description of her in the character of Rosamund, in Tennyson’s “Becket,” which I quote, by permission of the Macmillan Co., from “Shadows of the Stage”: * * * * * “Tennyson’s Rosamund is one of the loveliest creations in English literature. No character could be imagined in more complete unison with the nature and attributes disclosed in the acting of Ellen Terry. She embodied it in a fluent and delicious vein of spontaneity. In that part, as in Goethe’s Margaret, she conquered by simply allowing a rich individuality to show itself through careless glee, confiding abandonment, and a sweet bewilderment of tremulous apprehension, and once through the proud self-assertion of elemental nobility. That seems not difficult in the saying, but, obviously, it must be difficult to do; for whenever, in acting, the effect of nature is most absolute, there the means of art have been applied with the most of glamour, and concealed with the best of disguise. Throughout her performance there was no effort. All was grace. In the fugitive scene with Becket, and in the affectionate prattle--half raillery, half fondness--in the bower scene with Henry, the conditions are so simple that the effect might have become insipid but for her sumptuous personality, her profound sincerity, the plenitude of her enticing and piquant ways, the sunshine of her face, and the music of her delicious voice. During those scenes her preservation of girlish sprightliness never lapsed--till, with the final exclamation, ‘Some dreadful truth is breaking on me,’ she struck the chord of tenderest pathos, and showed herself all woman. Beauty and tenderness, in forlorn apprehension, overshadowed, shaken, and made half wild with nameless dread, constitute a conflicting image of lovely grief, such as Ellen Terry, beyond all the players of our time, is best fitted to impress upon the heart.” * * * * * I have frequently been offered $1,000 if I could secure Miss Terry for an afternoon’s reading in the drawing-rooms of wealthy people in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. LITERARY LECTURERS [Illustration]