I said that I was certainly among them.
That was how they made up a play which is certainly one of the most finished dramas in verse of the latter half of the nineteenth century.
It was Irving himself who told me something more about the same play. The subject had been suggested to Wills and he set about it with great fervour. He brought the first act to the Lyceum conclave. It opened in the banqueting hall of some castle, with a score of the usual cavaliers having the customary carouse, throwing about wooden goblets, and tossing off bumpers between the verses of some stirring songs of the type of “Oh, fill me a beaker as deep as you please,” leading up to the unavoidable brawl and the timely entrance of the King.
“It was exactly the opposite to all that I had in my mind,” Irving told me, “and I would have nothing to do with it. I wanted the domestic Charles, with his wife and children around him, and I would have nothing else.”
Happily he had his own way, and with the help of the fine lines transferred from Ninon, the play was received with acclamation, and, finely acted as it is now by Mr. H. B. Irving and his wife, it never fails to move an audience.
I think it was John Clayton who was the original Oliver Cromwell. I was told that his make-up was one of the most realistic ever seen. He was Cromwell—to the wart! Some one who came upon him in his dressing-room was lost in admiration of the perfection of the picture, and declared that the painter should sign it in the corner, “John Clayton, pinx.” But perhaps the actor and artist was Swinburne.
Only one more word in the Bateman connection. The varying fortunes of the family are well known—how the Bateman children made a marvellous success for a tune—how the eldest, Kate, played for months and years in Leah, filling the treasury of every theatre in England and America—how when the Lyceum was at the point of closing its odors, The Bells rang in an era of prosperity for all concerned; but I don't suppose that many people know' that Mrs. Bateman, the wife of “The Colonel,” was the author of several novels which she wrote for newspapers at one of the “downs” that preceded the “ups” in her life.