To trace in detail the history of “Irving and Terry” would be tedious. They acted together from 1878 to 1902. Their half dozen American tours aroused the same enthusiasm and loyalty that during all that long period was their portion at home.[82] Her retirement is so recent that the actress’s Portia, her Beatrice, Juliet, Imogen, Ophelia (to mention only the outstanding Shakespearean characters) are still fresh memories.[83] It is probably true, as Mr. Shaw maintains,[84] that despite the opportunities given her to act Shakespeare’s most charming heroines, Miss Terry’s association with Henry Irving really resulted in reducing her total accomplishment. Irving sacrificed her as he did himself and everyone and everything else, to his art. To be sure he mounted a number of plays--notably _Olivia_, _The Lady of Lyons_, _Faust_, _Madame Sans-Gêne_, and perhaps some of the Shakespearean comedies--primarily for her sake. Yet she little better than wasted much time and effort in playing secondary and unsuccessful parts in plays selected primarily for him. And, sorrow of sorrows, Rosalind, whom she was born to play, he never made possible for her. How incomparable she would have been!--a Rosalind of ideal aspect, of delicious high spirits, of consummate grace and tenderness.[85] But it seems, after all, rather futile and ungrateful, in the face of what has really been, to cavil about what might have been. Ellen Terry has actually been one of those rare spirits who confer a blessing on a gray world by their mere presence. As a woman she was lovable, simple, whole-heartedly human, generous, high spirited; as an actress, uniquely delightful and in many impersonations, by virtue of nature and instinct, of compelling power, even genius. Small wonder that we must reckon her as one of the great line of English women of the theatre, the last indeed of that small and scattered band, who, each in turn, were the queens of the stage; small wonder, too, that by thousands of hearts on both sides of the ocean she has been cherished as an idealized fellow creature. When she had at last left Sir Henry she bade fair to enlarge the scope of her already well-rounded career by appearing in plays of a more modern type than any that fell within the Lyceum’s scope. “When her son, Mr. Gordon Craig, became a father,” wrote George Bernard Shaw, “she said that no one would ever write plays for a grandmother. I immediately wrote _Captain Brassbound’s Conversion_ to prove the contrary. Once before I had tried to win her when I wrote _The Man of Destiny_ in which the heroine is simply a delineation of Ellen Terry, imperfect, it is true, for who can describe the indescribable?”[86]