The honoured guest of the evening--entertained upon his return from a foreign campaign--was a brilliant and gifted journalist, now no more, and chief among those whom he had specially desired Irving to invite to meet him was a distinguished statesman still living, though by deliberate choice he no longer takes an active part in public affairs. The guest for whom the entertainment was given arrived late, and when he appeared it was evident to those of us who knew him that he had dined, not wisely, but too well. On a sudden, and in response to the most harmless raillery on the part of the statesman to whom I have referred, he rose and retorted with the most bitter and, if I may say so, the most vulgar abuse; and while we all sat appalled by the outrage he was committing, he turned and appealed to Irving to justify his extraordinary outburst. It was then that Irving’s tact showed itself. Quietly and slowly he replied, “All I have to say, my dear friend, is, that first upon the list of those whom you specially desired I should invite to meet you this evening, stood the name of Lord----.” And then, as though to prove to us that he too could exhibit an equal measure of self-possession, the man so wantonly attacked, without a word of resentment or rebuke, quietly filled his glass and invited us to drink just one toast to say how glad we were to see our old friend returned once more from his travels abroad. CHAPTER XVIII SOME FOREIGN ACTORS As I have said in a previous chapter, H. J. Montague, at the time that I first became a theatre-goer, was the accepted _jeune premier_ of the time. He certainly had no rival among his own countrymen as the exponent of lovers’ parts in modern comedy. But there was a foreigner who had preceded him, whose art had a wider compass, and whose powers as a creator of the heroes of romance knew no rivalry. In such achievements Charles Fechter had a conquering gift that laid all lady worshippers at his feet. It was only at a later time that I saw him in Shakespeare, and then only in _Hamlet_. He was aged and had grown stout, and it is perhaps scarcely fair to speak of his abilities as a Shakespearian actor upon the imperfect evidence that was offered to me; but I thought even then that he treated the tragedy too exclusively from the point of view of a love story, reducing its higher imaginative message by too great a regard for Hamlet’s relations with Ophelia. But that very tendency which seemed to me a fault in his Hamlet was part of a gift that left him unapproachable in rôles that were purely romantic.