In his earlier years on the stage he was a little stiff and formal—characteristics which were not at all to his disadvantage in the young prig of _The Princess and the Butterfly_ and the solemn young man-about-town of _Letty_ (though the smart Bond Street suit and patent leather shoes of the man-about-town were obviously a sore trial to a boy who, from his earliest years, dressed after his father). I imagine his Crichton (1902) was his first real success in London, and an admirable Crichton it was, standing out, as the play demanded, with that vigour and stamp of personal domination which he had inherited from his father. His Hamlet, though his most important, was hardly his best part. It was too cerebral. But is not Hamlet, some one will ask, the very prince of cerebrals? Yes, but Hamlet has grace as well as thought, sweetness as well as light. Harry Irving’s Hamlet (of 1905, he softened much in the later revival) was a little didactic, almost donnish. He hardened the hardness of Hamlet—particularly his hardness to women, Ophelia and Gertrude, which we need not be sickly sentimentalists to dislike seeing emphasized. In a word he was impressive rather than charming—was perhaps almost harsh after the conspicuously charming Hamlet of Forbes-Robertson. Nevertheless, if Harry Irving’s Hamlet was second to Forbes-Robertson’s, it was a very good second. He had his father’s rather Mephistophelean humour—but I am annoyed to find myself always harping on his father. It is a tiresome obsession. None suffered from it more than the son himself, at once hero and martyr of filial piety. He invited comparison, playing as many as possible of his father’s old parts, all ragged and threadbare as they had become. But he lacked the quality which originally saved them, the romantic flamboyant _baroque_ quality of his father’s genius. Sir Henry impressed himself upon his time by sheer force of individuality and by what Byron calls “magnoperation.” He was a great manager as well as a great actor, doing everything on a gigantic scale and in the grand style. He was a splendid figure of romance, off as well as on the stage. It was hopeless to provoke comparison with such a being as this. Though the son showed the family likeness he was naturally a reasonable man, a scholar, a man of discursive analytic mind rather than of the instinctive perfervid histrionic temperament. It was always a pleasure to swop ideas with him, to talk to him about the principles of his art, the great criminals of history, or the latest murder trial he had been attending at the Old Bailey; but I suspect (I never tried) conversation with his father, in Boswell’s phrase, a “tremendous companion,” must have been a rather overwhelming experience.... And, after all, the wonderful thing is that the son stood the comparison so well, that he was not utterly crushed by it—that the successor of so exorbitant an artist could maintain any orbit of his own. That is a curious corner of our contemporary