Henry Irving and Ellen Terry acted together for twenty-four years. One is used to being told that the Irving _régime_ at the Lyceum constituted the most brilliant period of the English stage during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Brilliant it certainly was--a splendidly successful, dignified campaign in fostering the best English stage traditions. Yet one cannot but sympathize with George Bernard Shaw’s regret that Ellen Terry did not retire from Irving’s company sooner than she did. “I have never made a secret of my opinion,” wrote Shaw, “that the Lyceum undertaking, celebrated as it was, involved, when looked at from the purely dramatic side of the stage art, a most deplorable waste of two of the most remarkable talents of the end of the last century.” What Mr. Shaw objected to was the exclusion from the Lyceum repertoire of modern, radical dramatists, such as Ibsen, Hauptmann, and doubtless Mr. Shaw himself. But while he thought that Irving used Shakespeare’s plays not to interpret the dramatist’s characters but as frames for figures which were creations of the actor’s imagination, Mr. Shaw must needs say of Ellen Terry that “she understood Shakespeare, and knew how to impersonate Beatrice, Juliet, Imogen and the rest, intelligently, charmingly, exactly as they must have appeared to Shakespeare in his mind’s eye.” And it is probably true that Ellen Terry, devoted as she was to her “lovely art,” as she called it, was not more than casually interested in the development of the allied art, that of the dramatist. She disliked Ibsen, and had no desire for his sake to desert the Lyceum. “Why did she remain so long?” asks Mr. Shaw, and replying to himself: “The answer is found in the fact that the Lyceum, while it did not call her dramatic faculties into full play, gave the widest scope for the full development of a wonderful sense of the picturesque.” In other words, she was attracted by the romantic rather than the realistic, the poetic rather than the psychological.