But Mr. Bateman’s endeavour to force his younger daughter Isabella upon the acceptance of the public as a leading actress was not successful. The play of _Fanchette_, with which he opened his management, was a failure, and the part of the youthful hero, for which Irving was cast, was entirely unsuited to his special abilities. Other adventures followed, and they only had the effect of somewhat lowering the mark Irving had made in _The Two Roses_, and there came a time in the steadily waning fortunes of the theatre when it seemed that Mr. Bateman’s management was destined to come to an inglorious end. It was at that time that Irving, who had had for some little while in his possession Leopold Lewis’s dramatised version of Erckmann-Chatrian’s _Polish Jew_, persuaded Mr. Bateman to allow him to put it on the stage of the Lyceum. Irving has more than once told me the story himself, of how he and Bateman paced up and down the Adelphi terrace at midnight debating the possibilities of its success. Bateman, as he frankly avowed to the actor, had no faith in the popular appeal of the play, and it was, I suppose, only because he found himself at the end of his tether that he somewhat reluctantly consented to permit Irving to make the experiment. How hardly pressed the enterprising manager must have been at the time was proved by the fact that one evening, when I was walking with him down the Haymarket, he pointed to a corner public-house and said to me, “The owner of that house once held an umbrella over me in the rain when I most needed it, and I shall never forget it.” Nor shall I ever forget the extraordinary impression made upon my own imagination by my first sight of Irving in his performance of _The Bells_. I have often recalled in recollection the sentence penned by Dutton Cook, who was then the dramatic critic of the _Pall Mall Gazette_, wherein he said, “Acting at once so intelligent and so intense has not been seen upon the stage for years”; nor do I think any one who witnessed that performance, as it was rendered by Irving in the plenitude of his powers, would be disposed to question the verdict of the critic. To a youth I know it came as an astounding revelation--a revelation charged with such extraordinary concentration of personal feeling that the first vision of it as I recall it now seemed to have almost transgressed the limits of art, so poignant, even to the verge of pain, was the actor’s relentless portraiture of crime and remorse. It was in Dick Bateman’s company that I first witnessed Irving’s performance of _The Bells_, and it was through Mr. Bateman’s introduction that I first learned to know the actor himself.