As a producer he continued the tradition of Irving, bestowing upon Shakspere’s plays superb settings, rivaling Irving’s in their splendor, their expensiveness and their taste. For ‘Twelfth Night,’ for example, he designed an Italian garden, rising terrace upon terrace to the very back of the stage, a scene so exquisitely beautiful in itself, so completely satisfying to the eye, that—so Sir Martin Conway told me—some spectators felt it to be an intrusion when the actors entered and distracted attention from the lovely vision. Tree displayed his scenic dexterity and his artistic invention in a dozen or a score of other Shaksperian plays, notably ‘Antony and Cleopatra,’ produced while Queen Victoria was still upon the throne. There is an anecdote which is doubtless familiar to many, but which I feel I have no right to omit here, to the effect that as the amorous adventures of the serpent of old Nile were unrolled before the entranced audience, one British matron whispered to another British matron, “How different to the happy home life of our dear Queen!” Of course, Tree reserved for himself all the great Shaksperian characters, tragic and comic, Mark Antony, Macbeth and Hamlet, Falstaff and Malvolio. For the loftier tragic parts he lacked the physique and the temperament. He had not the beauty of person, the grace of gesture, the princely bearing, the appealing voice, which the performer of Hamlet ought to possess. He had not the power, the passion, the largeness needed for Macbeth. He had not the elocutionary skill required for the proper impersonation of Mark Antony in ‘Julius Cæsar.’ But he was intelligent, untiring, strong-willed and self-willed; and he was able to get the British public to accept him in these unsuitable parts, perhaps in some measure because there was then no actor on the British stage who could contest its chieftainship with him. It is reported that Gilbert said to him after seeing his Hamlet, “Very good, Tree, very good indeed. You were funny without being vulgar.” And when Gilbert went around to Tree’s dressing room after his exhausting performance of another of Shakspere’s tragic characters, a performance which had left the actor weakened and perspiring, the pitiless wit remarked, “Tree, how well your skin acts.” Altho Tree took himself seriously he had a keen sense of humor; and even if he winced under the satiric lash of Gilbert, he could take the joke without offense.