Then the local critics were down upon him, and his friends warned him to abandon an effort that was evidently beyond his powers. But young though he was, and disheartened though he must have been, Henry Irving had faith in himself, and determined to overcome all obstacles. He had to work hard, and he had to live hard, but his career, though often crossed by the forbidding stream of discouragement, was one of steady progress, and his comrades of these struggling days have told me that whatever he had to endure (and the endurance must have been as bitter as it was long), he never forgot to be that thing so impossible of definition, and so capable of recognition--a gentleman. Indeed, having from the very outset keenly watched his public career, while I have for many years been privileged to enjoy his personal friendship, I have often thought that Henry Irving might have taken for his motto the well-known lines:-- "The World has battle-room for all, Go! fight, and conquer if ye can; But if ye rise, or if ye fall, Be each, pray God, a gentleman." One of his most charming characteristics is that he has never forgotten an old friend. _Videlicet_: in the troubled days of 1856 there was playing at the Sunderland theatre a comedian named Sam Johnson. He never achieved great things, but he encouraged the anxious aspirant with kindly words, and in the after years he found himself an honoured member of the famous Lyceum company. In these early days I did not see any performance by Henry Irving that could strictly be called impressive, and yet, to me, and to many others, there was something in his appearance and manner that was singularly attractive. We did not realise it then, but no doubt it was that subtle charm that, for want of a better name or definition, we call, in an actor, "magnetism." Added to this was his wonderful capacity for painstaking, which, according to Thomas Carlyle, is the very essence of genius. For some time he was a member of the well-conducted stock company of the Theatre Royal, Edinburgh. The late Robert Wyndham, the genial and highly-esteemed proprietor of that historic playhouse, once told me that though in those early days he did not look upon Henry Irving as a particularly promising actor, he was always struck with the intense care that he took over any part entrusted to him, however small and insignificant it might be. "I am certain," he said, "that Henry Irving, without being in the least degree a fop, would have gone without his dinner in order to buy a 'button-hole,' or any such trivial adornment that he thought might add, even in the minutest degree, to the effect of the part in which he had to appear."