It is four or five years since he conceived the idea of founding the Players' Club, and, having become a man of more than ordinary means, he was able to gratify this ambition. He bought and rebuilt a fine house in a desirable position in New York, and filled it with choice books and pictures and relics of the stage, and then invited men of distinction and culture to meet actors of character and ability on an equal footing. The club has been eminently successful, and for several years Booth, its founder and president, made it his home. He had a suite of rooms, modestly but tastefully furnished, and among his friends and books and pictures passed the last days of his life. When he wrote the extracts from the Shakespearian sonnets in the volume he gave me thirty years ago, I think he felt some consciousness of the ban that the world then put upon his profession, but he could not have retained the feeling, for there was no ban applied to him. Exclusive English aristocrats invited him and his daughter, and visited them in return; and Edwin Booth voted to admit Grover Cleveland to the Century Club, and invited General Sherman to become a member of the Players'. I was very much struck, on my return from Europe in 1881, with the dignity and composure which years of recognition had given to his bearing. The glowing beauty of his youth, of course, was gone, his features bore traces of his own sorrows and experiences, and besides were worn and hardened by those terrible passions of the stage which were for the time so real to him. I have indeed no doubt that it was the intense strain on brain and nerve which his acting demanded, and not any private grief or anxiety, that broke him down before his time. Years, however, had enhanced his innate nobility. He was always reverent to religion, and had warm friends among the clergy of various denominations. A Catholic priest and the Protestant Bishop of New York were among the first to call after his paralysis was known. I never heard him speak disrespectfully of sacred themes or of good women. His character in later years took on a softer phase; his irritability was rarer, indeed it almost disappeared, while the range of his friendships was wider. When he received a foreign actor who came to call on him, as they all did, or welcomed some distinguished visitor to his club, he did it with a calm dignity and gracious courtesy that was very natural and yet imposing, while his more intimate bearing when we were alone was inexpressibly confiding and affectionate, though more subdued than in the earlier days. In his acting also there was something of the same inevitable change that time brings to all things and all men; but to me he always remained the most powerful and consummate tragedian I have ever seen. Some of the old force may have faded, but it flashed out at intervals in every performance with all its ancient brilliancy. The last time that I saw him on the stage,