In order to realise the kind and the measure of effect which Irving’s intense individuality exercised over the public of that date, it is necessary to recall, if only for a moment, the condition of the stage at the time. Phelps’s career, in which he had so loyally and so honourably sustained the great tradition he had received from Macready, had practically, for all its influence upon the art, come to an end. He was still to be seen, as I saw him, in occasional engagements at Drury Lane, and later under the management of John Hollingshead at the Gaiety, and it was still possible to appreciate the great and sterling qualities of high training and accomplishment that he brought to the service of the theatre. But the magic which could win the attention of a new generation was no longer there. Its influence, perhaps, had been partly destroyed by the advent of Fechter’s more romantic method, which, even in his rendering of the classic drama, granted to his performance something of the charm and allurement of the conquering hero of a fairy story. And on the other side of the picture there was gradually arising a new school, though it seemed to be at the time exercised in only the tiniest arena, wherein a determined effort was being made to bring life as it was presented on the stage into closer alliance with the accepted realities of contemporary manners. A revolution in little had been started in the theatre in Tottenham Court Road--a revolution due in the first instance to the talent of Robertson, which was destined to exercise a lasting influence over the theatre in England. Robertson’s new outlook, ably supported as it was by Marie Bancroft and her husband, who found and captured an ally of added strength in the person of John Hare, had the effect, for a while at least, of throwing classical drama into discredit, and it was therefore a matter of supreme difficulty for an actor equipped as Irving was, whose vision struck deeper and whose ambition took a wider range, to find a way to draw back the wandering attention of the public to the more passionate drama which for the time had fallen out of fashion. It was left to him almost unaided to forge a convention of his own, and it is perhaps the highest tribute to his innate gift as an actor that, although endowed by nature with few of the graces an actor might desire to claim, he was enabled from this first adventure in _The Bells_ to win little by little, and with every step in his career fiercely disputed, a commanding position among the professors of his art.