This marvellous performance has ripened and improved year by year, gaining in suggestion, fulness of detail, and perfect ease. In no other part is he so completely the character. There is a pleasant good-humour—a chuckling cunning—an air of indifference, as though it were not worth while to be angry or excited about things. His figure is a picture, and his face, wonderfully transformed, yet seems to owe scarcely anything to the ‘making-up.’ Nowhere does he speak so much with his expressive features. You see the cunning thought rising to the surface before the words. There is the hypocritical air of candour or frankness suddenly assumed, to conceal some villainous device. There is the genuine enjoyment of hypocrisy, and the curious shambling walk. How admirably graduated, too, the progress of decay and mortal sickness, with the resistance to their encroachments. The portrait of his Richard—not the old-established, roaring, stamping Richard of the stage, but the weightier and more composed and refined—dwells long on the memory, especially such touches as his wary watchings, looking from one to the other while they talk, as if cunningly striving to probe their thoughts; that curious scraping of his cheek with the finger, the strange senile tones, the sudden sharp ferocity betokening the ingrained wickedness, and the special leer, as though the old fox were in high good humour. Irving naturally recalls with pleasure any spontaneous and unaffected tributes which his acting has called forth. A most flattering one is associated with ‘Louis XI.’—a critical work which one of his admirers had specially printed, and which enforced the actor’s view of Louis’s character. “You will wonder,” the author said, “why we wrote and compiled this book. A critic had said that, as nothing was really known of the character, manners, etc., of Louis XI., an actor might take what liberties he pleased with the subject. We prepared this little volume to put on record a refutation of the statement, a protest against it, and a tribute to your impersonation of the character.” Another admirer had printed his various thoughts on Charles I. This was set off with beautifully-executed etchings, tailpieces, etc., and the whole richly bound and enshrined in a casket. The names of these enthusiasts are not given.[16]