Never, it may safely be said, has any actor been more popular than Henry Irving, not only with the public but with members of his own profession. That he deserves his popularity no one who has studied his remarkable career will deny; that he has won it "facing fearful odds" his most intimate friends and ardent admirers must candidly admit. Even to-day, when his fame is so firmly established, that he could, if it troubled him at all, laugh at adverse and hostile criticism, we find any number of self-constituted and ridiculously complacent censors ready to tell us that he won his spurs by a fluke, and that he cannot be regarded as a great actor. Men existed who said the same of Betterton, Garrick, and Kean. But how absurd it is to hear such opinions when we know that, thanks to him, the Lyceum Theatre has for years and years been the cherished resort of all that is intellectual in modern life. When he first began to make his successes, and had the jealousy that he has long since vanquished to fight, his so-called "mannerisms" (and is it not a truism that there never was an actor, or, for the matter of that, author, yet without some mannerism or speciality that made him a man of mark and so attracted the public to his piping?) were mercilessly caricatured and lampooned, and a weaker man might well have been crushed under the heaps of ill-natured ridicule that were, mud-like, hurled at him. But an indomitable worker as well as a brave and generous man he rose superior to it all, and in a few busy, and no doubt very anxious, years the difficult sum was done in order that it might be incontestably proved, and to the satisfaction and advantage of all except the croakers, who even less than any one else understand their own croakings, our great English actor of to-day holds his throne. "What a blessed thing it is," said wise Oliver Wendell Holmes, "that Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors" (and original actors take rank amongst the best of authors), "contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left." No actor more conclusively proves the rightly held theory that the perfection of dramatic art can only be achieved by early apprenticeship and many years devoted to earnest study and incessant hard work than Henry Irving. In a period of three and a half years he had played no fewer than four hundred and twenty-eight parts before his claim to be regarded as one of the most promising actors of his day was even considered. Well might the actor ponder over Chaucer's beautiful lines-- "The lyfe so short, The crafte so long to lerne, The essay so hard, So sharpe the conquering."