His performance of King Lear gave new evidence of his limitations. During the first two acts he made the king a merely restless, choleric, disagreeable old man, deficient in dignity, destitute of grandeur, and especially destitute of inherent personal fascination--of the suggestiveness of ever having been a great man. Lear is a ruin--but he has been a Titan; the delight of all hearts no less than the monarch of all minds. The actor who does not invest him with that inherent, overwhelming personal fascination does not attain to his altitude. The cruel afflictions that occur in the tragedy do not of themselves signify: the pity is only that they should occur to him. That is the spring of all the pathos. In Salvini's Lear there were beautiful moments and magnificent bits of action. "I gave you all" and "I'm cold myself" were exquisite points. He missed altogether, however, the more subtle significance of the reminiscent reference to Cordelia--as in "No more of that, I have noted it well"--and he gave, at the beginning, no intimation of impending madness. In fact he introduced no element of lunacy till he reached the lines about "red-hot spits" in Edgar's first mad scene. Much of Salvini's mechanism in Lear was crude. He put the king behind a table, in the first scene--which had the effect of preparation for a lecture; and it pleased him to speak the storm speech away back at the upper entrance, with his body almost wholly concealed behind painted crags. With all its moments of power and of tenderness the embodiment was neither royal, lovable, nor great. It might be a good Italian Lear: it was not the Lear of Shakespeare. Salvini was particularly out of the character in the curse scene and in the frantic parting from the two daughters, because there the quality of the man, behind the action, seemed especially common. The action, though, was theatrical and had its due effect. XXIV. HENRY IRVING AS EUGENE ARAM. Henry Irving's impersonation of Eugene Aram--given in a vein that is distinctly unique--was one of strange and melancholy grace and also of weird poetical and pathetic power.