Much the most interesting person and much the ablest performer who has appeared under the management of Belasco is Blanche Bates. At the zenith of her career she exhibited a combination of brilliant beauty, inspiriting animation and impetuous vigor quite extraordinary and irresistibly winning. Her lovely dark eyes sparkled with glee. Her handsome countenance radiated gladness. She seemed incarnate joy. Her voice was clear, liquid, sweet; her enunciation distinct, her bearing distinguished, her action free and graceful. I have seldom seen an actress whose mere presence conveyed such a delightful sense of abounding vitality and happiness. In the last ten years no actress in our country has equalled her in brilliancy and power. She might have grasped the supremacy of the American Stage, alike in Comedy and Tragedy, personating such representative parts as Shakespeare’s _Beatrice_ and _Cleopatra_ and taking by right the place once occupied by Ada Rehan and afterward by Julia Marlowe. While under Belasco’s management she did give three performances which deservedly are remembered among the best of her time,--namely, _Cigarette_, in “Under Two Flags”; _Yo-San_, in “The Darling of the Gods,” and _The Girl_, in “The Girl of the Golden West.” But, although incontestably she possesses intellectual character, a strain of capricious levity is also among her attributes; she has weakly acquiesced to the dictates of vacuous social taste and sordid commercial spirit, paltered with her great talents, thrown away high ambition and golden opportunity, and so came at last to mere failure and obscurity. Her nature and her artistic style require for their full and free arousal and exercise parts of romantic, passionate, picturesque character, admitting of large, bold, sparkling treatment. She acted under Belasco’s direction for about twelve years: since leaving it, in 1912, she has done nothing in the Theatre of importance. “The modern, ’drawing-room drama’ in which she aspired to play,”--so Belasco once remarked to me,--“is not, to my mind, suited to her, and so we parted.”