Toole was never the same after the painful death of his son: he became more and more a slave to "late hours," but was still a delightful, buoyant companion, beloved by his comrades and friends.
Wilson Barrett was a good actor of the robust type. He had an adventurous career: sometimes high on the wave of success, at others deep down in the trough of the sea of failure, but always strictly honourable. At the old Princess's Theatre, in Oxford Street, he made large sums by good dramas like The Silver King and The Lights of London, and lost them through the failures of ambitious efforts, which included a youthful Hamlet, to be wiped out in turn by the enormous success of The Sign of the Cross, a religious drama that appealed to a large public which rarely entered theatres. The play provoked Bernard Shaw to say that Wilson Barrett could always bring down the house with a hymn, and had so evident a desire to personate the Messiah that we might depend upon seeing him crucified yet.
William Terriss
A restless, untamable spirit was born in William Terriss. He tried various callings before settling down to the one for which he was so eminently fitted. He embarked in the mercantile marine, but the craze only lasted a fortnight. Then came tea-planting in China. The next experiment was made in medicine, to be followed by an attack upon engineering. He then positively bluffed me into giving him an engagement, and made his appearance on the stage. Suddenly he decided to go sheep farming in the Falkland Islands. He made an early marriage, and his beloved Ellaline was born there. Of course he soon came back; returned to and left the stage again; next to Kentucky to try horse-breeding. Another failure brought him to his senses. Five years after he had first adopted the stage he was an actor in earnest and became one of its greatest favourites.
His career was chiefly identified with the Lyceum and the Adelphi; but he first became prominent by his acting as Thornhill in Olivia, under Hare's management at the Court Theatre. His bright, breezy nature was a tonic, and, like his daughter and her husband, Seymour Hicks, he carried sunshine about with him and shed it on all he met. He was as brave as a lion and as graceful as a panther.
Alas! one Saturday evening the town was horrified as the tragic news quickly spread that Terriss had been fatally stabbed by a malignant madman as he was entering the Adelphi Theatre to prepare for his evening's work. At his funeral there was an extraordinary manifestation of public sympathy.
Lionel Monckton told me a curious story of how when he reached home he found that a clock which Terriss gave him had stopped at the hour of the murder.
However briefly, I must record grateful thanks for past enjoyment given us by Corney Grain, as great a master in his branch of art as that friend of my youth, John Parry. His odd name was often wrongly thought to be assumed, as was that of a dramatist of those days, Stirling Coyne, who rejoiced in the nickname of "Filthy Lucre."
I always remember the stifled laughter of my wife and Corney Grain, who was present with ourselves at a dinner party, when a distinguished foreigner, accredited by Spain to the Court of St. James, was announced by a nervous manservant as the "Spanish Ham..."—a long pause being followed by a trembling sotto voce—"bassador."
"Gee Gee" and "Wee Gee"