"When the blind went up and down and you smiled," he replied--surely a na•ve compliment to my way of "taking a call"! Further pressed, he volunteered: "When you lay on the bed and died to please the angels." XIV LAST DAYS AT THE LYCEUM I had exactly ten years more with Henry Irving after "Henry VIII." During that time we did "King Lear," "Becket," "King Arthur," "Cymbeline," "Madame Sans-Gne," "Peter the Great" and "The Medicine Man." I feel too near to these productions to write about them. The first night of "Cymbeline" I felt almost dead. Nothing seemed right. "Everything is so slow, so slow," I wrote in my diary. "I don't feel a bit inspired, only dull and hide-bound." Yet Imogen was, I think, the _only_ inspired performance of these later years. On the first night of "Sans-Gne" I acted _courageously_ and fairly well. Every one seemed to be delighted. The old Duke of Cambridge patted, or rather _thumped_, me on the shoulder and said kindly: "Ah, my dear, _you_ can act!" Henry quite effaced me in his wonderful sketch of Napoleon. "It seems to me some nights," I wrote in my diary at the time, "as if I were watching Napoleon trying to imitate H.I., and I find myself immensely interested and amused in the watchings." "The Medicine Man" was, in my opinion, our only _quite_ unworthy production. _From my Diary._--"Poor Taber has such an awful part in the play, and mine is even worse. It is short enough, yet I feel I can't cut too much of it.... The gem of the whole play is my hair! Not waved at all, and very filmy and pale. Henry, I admit, is splendid; but oh, it is all such rubbish!... If 'Manfred' and a few such plays are to succeed this, I simply must do something else." But I did not! I stayed on, as every one knows, when the Lyceum as a personal enterprise of Henry's was no more--when the farcical Lyceum Syndicate took over the theater. I played a wretched part in "Robespierre," and refused £12,000 to go to America with Henry in "Dante." In these days Henry was a changed man. He became more republican and less despotic as a producer. He left things to other people. As an actor he worked as faithfully as ever. Henley's stoical lines might have been written of him as he was in these last days: "Out of the night that covers me, Black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods there be For my unconquerable soul. "In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud: Beneath the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody but unbowed." Henry Irving did not treat me badly. I hope I did not treat him badly. He revived "Faust" and produced "Dante." I would have liked to stay with him to the end of the chapter, but there was nothing for me to act in either of these plays. But we never quarreled. Our long partnership dissolved naturally. It was all very sad, but it could not be helped.