Nothing he enjoyed more than studying human nature in its various phases of excitement. He was found one day on the hustings of a contested election and much enjoyed pointing out how the passions of those in front of his view-point were delineated in their actions and faces. At another time he happened to be present at a provincial cricket dinner, which ended in a fiasco, and it is not easy to forget how eagerly he watched the physiognomies of those who unhappily contended around him. It was on this occasion, after he had previously electrified the company with one of his powerful recitations (he was still a City clerk), that upon being asked to give a toast, he gave one typical of his own feelings on such occasions, “The Pleasure of Pleasing.” The time came when he left the City—July 1856—and entered upon his new and loved profession. He was most careful in the selection of articles that would be useful to him in his future career, and the wonderful forethought and adaptation which were afterwards so successful at the Lyceum were foreshadowed in the purchases for his first small wardrobe. Although he did not look back with much pleasure to his days in the City, he always welcomed most heartily and kindly any of his former companions who called on him at the Lyceum, and in one instance gave employment to one needing it. One object of these reminiscences is to show his numerous friends that as a youth he developed the same kindly, thoughtful and clever characteristics which they recognised and admired in his later life. The very early portrait of him in the possession of the writer gives clear evidence to those who knew his father in the early fifties, how closely he inherited his remarkable physiognomy, while much of his mental power was undoubtedly derived from the mother who doted on him—of whom she always spoke as “My Boy.” One later reminiscence may be added. He was met on June 21, 1887, walking up and down opposite the Horse Guards, studying the holiday crowd and waiting for the return of the Queen’s Jubilee procession. As his salutation, his friend asked him “How is it you are not in the Abbey?” The reply was, “Oh, they have given me a seat, but I don’t think I shall go in.” The service was then about half over, but his well-known face appears in the plate published to commemorate the Jubilee, in the place assigned to him. This is only one out of many illustrations that might be given of his delight in quiet enjoyment, rather than in any desire for public notoriety. We know that the laurel pall used over his coffin in Westminster Abbey covered the ashes not only of a “dominating personality” but also of a true gentleman. C. R. F. XLIV IRVING’S PHILOSOPHY OF HIS ART I