From this time, in 1874, until more than thirty years later, Ellen Terry was continuously before the public. In 1875, S. B. Bancroft (later Sir Squire)--one of the ablest actor-managers of the day--determined upon a daring experiment at his little Prince of Wales’s Theatre, a bandbox of a theatre hitherto dedicated to the “teacup and saucer drama.” This was his production of _The Merchant of Venice_. The play has never been set more beautifully, and as we shall see, it was in one part acted to perfection. But it failed through the failure of Charles Coghlan as Shylock. For Ellen Terry, however, it was really the first great triumph of her career. For her Portia on this occasion was a real triumph. She was twenty-seven, in the very perfection of her youth and beauty, and it was her first important venture with a Shakespearean part. Her success was immediate, and Portia, in the minds of many, always remained her most charming and characteristic impersonation.[78] “Success I had had of a kind, and I had tasted the delight of knowing that audiences liked me, and had liked them back again! But never until I appeared as Portia at the Prince of Wales’s had I experienced that awe-struck feeling which comes, I suppose, to no actress more than once in a lifetime--the feeling of the conqueror. In homely parlance, I knew that I had ‘got them’ at the moment when I spoke the speech beginning: ‘You see me, Lord Bassanio, where I stand.’ ‘What can this be?’ I thought. ‘_Quite_ this thing has never come to me before.’ It was never to be quite the same again. Elation, triumph, being lifted on high by a single stroke of the mighty wing of glory--call it by any name--it was as Portia that I had my first and last sense of it.” In spite of Miss Terry’s personal success, the Bancrofts’ splendid revival of _The Merchant of Venice_ was short lived. Its thirty-six performances served, however, to lay firmly the foundations of Ellen Terry’s fame. Only three years were to elapse before she made her epoch-making association with Henry Irving. She spent first a year with the Bancrofts, helping them give life to a group of already old-fashioned dramas, _Money_, _The Lady of Lyons_, _Masks and Faces_, and _Ours_. “She enacted Clara Douglas and Pauline as well as they have been ever played in our time, and showed us that the staginess of the stagiest of old plays can be eliminated by acting so sincere and natural as that of Ellen Terry.”[79]