But he started for England a few days afterward, and it was not till the next year that I returned there. Then I saw much of him. He played this time with great success, at Irving's theatre. The great English actor gave him every facility; relinquished his house to him for a while, and treated him with a distinguished courtesy worthy of his own position as head of the British stage. Irving had been in the stock company that supported Booth during his first English engagement, but now they were equals, and played on alternate nights, and sometimes together, in Othello and Iago. Booth's houses were crowded with the most cultivated and important people in England; and his acting, despite a certain national jealousy, was by many pronounced superior to that of the Englishman. Invitations came to him from aristocratic quarters, in which his daughter was included; but his wife was in miserable health and unable to go at all into the world, or even to receive any one but her own family. This marred the gratification at his success, and in 1881, after lingering in great suffering, both for herself and those about her, the second wife of Edwin Booth also died. I had returned from Europe and passed the night after her funeral in his rooms at New York. His mother and sister also passed away, and his daughter married, so that he was left, in a great degree, alone. His profession, however, remained to him. It was about this time that he began those remarkable dramatic tours with Barrett which were more successful from a pecuniary point of view than any other of his enterprises. It is even said, by those competent to pronounce, that the financial results surpassed any known in the history of the stage. Everywhere he was recognized as the head of the American theatre. His acting was ripened and chastened by study and long experience, by the development of his own powers, and the opportunities he had enjoyed of comparison with his greatest foreign rivals. He was accepted as the equal in America of what Garrick had been in his palmiest days--the peer and companion of whatever was best in American society.