He was always a good stage speaker. Late in life he began to speak elsewhere, and finally to lecture. His success pleased him immensely. The night of the Sunday afternoon charity for the Newsboys’ Home in Louisville, when the promise of a talk from him had filled the house to overflowing, he was like a boy who had come off from a college occasion with all the honors. Indeed, the degrees of Harvard and Yale, which had reached him both unexpectedly and unsolicited, gave him a pleasure quite apart from the vanity they might have gratified in another; he regarded them, and justly, as the recognition at once of his profession and of his personal character. I never knew a man whose moral sensibilities were more acute. He loved the respectable. He detested the unclean. He was just as attractive off the stage as upon it, because he was as unaffected and real in his personality as he was sincere and conscientious in his public representations, his lovely nature showing through his art in spite of him. His purpose was to fill the scene and forget himself. V The English newspapers accompanied the tidings of Mr. Jefferson’s death with rather sparing estimates of his eminence and his genius, though his success in London, where he was well known, had been unequivocal. Indeed, himself, alone with Edwin Booth and Mary Anderson, may be said to complete the list of those Americans who have attained any real recognition in the British metropolis. The Times spoke of him as “an able if not a great actor.” If Joseph Jefferson was not a great actor I should like some competent person to tell me what actor of our time could be so described. Two or three of the journals of Paris referred to him as “the American Coquelin.” It had been apter to describe Coquelin as the French Jefferson. I never saw Frederic Lemaître. But, him apart, I have seen all the eccentric comedians, the character actors of the last fifty years, and, in spell power, in precision and deftness of touch, in acute, penetrating, all-embracing and all-embodying intelligence and grasp, I should place Joseph Jefferson easily at their head. Shakespeare was his Bible. The stage had been his cradle. He continued all his days a student. In him met the meditative and the observing faculties. In his love of fishing, his love of painting, his love of music we see the brooding, contemplative spirit joined to the alert in mental force and foresight when he addressed himself to the activities and the objectives of the theater. He was a thorough stage manager, skillful, patient and upright. His company was his family. He was not gentler with the children and grandchildren he ultimately drew about him than he had been with the young men and young women who had preceded them in his employment and instruction.