He was remarkable as a schoolboy for a prodigious and extraordinary memory. I have spoken, in the earlier pages of this book, of the memory of Churton Collins, but in Dick Bateman’s case the faculty was differently exercised. It seemed in him to be purely mechanical, and we used to delight, as schoolboys, to set him the task, in which he rarely failed, of reading over a page of any author and then requiring of him that he should repeat it word for word. That special kind of memory which appeared to be detached from any personal interest in the matter recalled, it has not been my chance to see equalled in any other man I have known. I have spoken of him as “poor” Dick Bateman because he met an early and tragic fate, for after a few years spent in London in occasional employment under his father he was sent upon some business adventure to the East, and was drowned in a shipwreck which occurred off the coast of Japan. But in our schooldays, and in the years immediately succeeding our schooldays, we were close comrades, and it was through him that I won my first knowledge of Irving, who had already appeared in several plays in which I had seen him, but who had then been recently engaged by Mr. Bateman as a leading actor to support his daughter, Isabella Bateman, in whose interests he had undertaken the management of the Lyceum Theatre. I had seen Irving before that time when he had played Bob Gassett in _Dearer than Life_ at the Queen’s Theatre, and I had seen him again in _Uncle Dick’s Darling_ at the Gaiety, when he had appeared in company with Toole. It was of the latter performance that Toole afterwards told me Charles Dickens had said, when he saw it, that he thought it admirable in the promise it gave of the young actor’s ability; though he had added: “I fancy that both he and the author have cast an eye over my character of Mr. Dombey--eh, Toole?” And to any one who saw the performance there could have been no doubt as to the justice of Dickens’s suggestion. It was at a little later date that Irving achieved his first great success with the public in the character of Digby Grant in Mr. Albery’s play of _The Two Roses_, and it was after that again that he became permanently engaged to Mr. Bateman.