less winsome in other ways than she was. But in truth she was a most attractive woman, beautiful to look at and a joy to listen to. Her early death left a void in the English stage. Of Ellen Terry I need not speak. All men know what she is, and none deny her sovereignty. Besides, I am dealing only with the past. Will the future bring anything quite so charming? Fifty or sixty years ago the palm went to the elder actresses. Mrs. Sterling as Peg Woffington in Tom Taylor and Charles Reade’s _Masks and Faces_, playing up to Benjamin Webster’s Triplet, was one of the most extraordinary pieces of acting that I ever saw; and when she appeared as the Nurse in _Romeo and Juliet_ one could only mourn over the cruelty of time, feeling of how delightful a Juliet the years had robbed us. Mrs. Wigan, acting with her husband as Mrs. Sternhold in _Still Waters run Deep_, was memorably good, and when in _The Bengal Tiger_, in order to win the heart of the old Nabob (again Alfred Wigan as the tiger), she tried to smoke a hookah, her agonies were excruciatingly funny. Mrs. Keeley, too, was a tower of strength to any company. Her Jack Sheppard lives in my memory, as indeed do many of her parts, as a most finished dramatic picture—the prison scene absolutely harrowing. Like Robson and Garrick, she could be tragic or comic at will. In our young actresses, _ingénues_, we were not so fortunate as the play-goers of the present day. But we did possess one star, at any rate, of the first magnitude. In 1862, when Miss Kate Terry appeared in _The Duke’s Motto_ with Fechter,[35] whose triumphs at Paris with Madame Doche in the creation of the _Dame aux Camélias_ were world-famous, all London, from Charles Dickens downwards, vowed that such romantic acting had never been seen and could never be beaten. The fascination of the love scenes was bewildering. There was nothing theatrical about them. They were the very poetry of emotion. When she left the stage after a very short and brilliant career to become the gracious châtelaine of Moray Lodge, that small portion of the world which calls itself Society was the gainer, but to the world at large it was a heavy loss. Miss Madge Robertson, now Mrs. Kendal, was both a lovely girl and a most fascinating actress. She it was, unless my memory fails me, who with her husband created Gilbert’s _Pygmalion and Galatea_, which was also one of Miss Mary Anderson’s great parts. Gilbert was lucky in getting two such ladies to interpret him.