Even fifty years ago, when Edwin Booth opened the stately theater he had built for himself, there arose a loud outcry against the mediocrity of his company, an outcry which rankled in Booth’s memory and which led him a score of years later to explain to me that he thought the complaint, even if justified, was unjust to him, since he had secured as well equipt a company as it was then possible to collect, with Edwin Adams and Mark Smith at the head of it. This came back to my memory when Henry Irving a little later spoke to me about the difficulty he had had in getting fit performers for Laertes and Mercutio and the other important parts of youthful buoyancy. “I engaged Forbes-Robertson and George Alexander and William Terriss, one after another, and I tried to tempt them to stay with me,” so Irving said to me. “But they preferred to set up for themselves. I don’t blame them, of course; but it is now almost impossible for me to find anybody whom I can trust with these important parts.” It was sometimes meanly suggested that Booth and Irving were each of them unwilling, and perhaps even afraid, to surround themselves with first class actors. The suggestion is as absurd as it is unworthy; and it is plainly contradicted by the record. In the sixties of the last century, when Booth was consolidating his reputation by the earliest hundred night run of ‘Hamlet’ that any actor had ever achieved, Bogumil Davison came to New York; and the young American promptly invited the German tragedian to play Othello to his own Iago. More than a score of years later Booth again appeared as Iago to the Othello of Salvini. At one time or another he joined forces with Charlotte Cushman and with Modjeska. Henry Irving was equally free from petty jealousy; he always treated Ellen Terry as a co-star; and when he engaged Mrs. Sterling for the Nurse in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ he advertized her name as prominently as his own. No actor ever displayed more generosity to a friendly rival than Irving did when he invited Booth to come for a fortnight to the Lyceum to alternate Iago and Othello.