She did not return to London until the late autumn. On November 1, 1879, we first saw that beautiful revival of "The Merchant of Venice," which, thanks to Ellen Terry's Portia and Henry Irving's Shylock, became one of the greatest of the long series of Lyceum triumphs, and remains to this day one of the most attractive items in the Irving repertory. His impersonation of the "Jew that Shakespeare drew" is as instinct with purpose to-day as it was in 1879. I know that there are some critics who declare that he imparts so much dignity to the character that he dwarfs the other portraits in the play. That is true of the actor, but surely these critics are wrong? Most students of Shakespeare realise that Shylock never became actively malignant until the Christians, who on the Rialto had insulted him, who had called him misbeliever and cut-throat dog, and spat upon his Jewish gaberdine, had robbed him of his daughter and his ducats. Then the sufferance that he declared to be the badge of all his tribe broke down. Then, being a man as well as a Jew, he became, not unrighteously, savage, showed his teeth, and, living in a cruel age (when human torture was a thing of every day), viciously resolved to have his "pound of flesh." It is hardly likely that he thought it would come in his way when, in "a merry sport," he signed the bond with Antonio. That is the filled-in picture that Henry Irving gives us of this wonderfully outlined character. We may be horrified at the vindictive moods of his Shylock, but we understand him, and realise the cruel wrongs that have worked him up to a frenzied hatred of his bantering tormentors. He makes us see the patient endurance and personal dignity of the man, and, if at the end of the grandly wrought story we cannot quite sympathise with him, we are called upon to acknowledge the infinite patience of his punishment. To thousands and thousands of playgoers, and to those who dearly love their Shakespeare, Henry Irving has illumined the superbly limned design of Shylock.