Of the English Roscius it has been said that he was always acting, whether upon the stage, in his own house, in the houses of his friends, and even in the streets.
He would suddenly stop in the middle of a public thoroughfare, and look up at the sky as if he saw something remarkable, until a crowd gathered about him, and then he would turn away with the wild stare of insanity. He could not sit down to have his hair dressed without terrifying the barber by making his face assume every shade of expression, from the deepest tragic gloom to the vacancy of idiotcy.
His enemies ascribed these feats to a restless egotism that must always be conspicuous, but might they not rather have arisen from the over-exuberant animal spirits of "the cheerfulest man of his age"?
Such, in a great measure, was Sothern's nature, and it is not to be wondered at if it sometimes jarred upon those who had to act with him, and who were desirous to do justice to themselves. I cannot suppose that his "My Wife's Father's Sister's" victims loved him any more than they did the innocent writer of these lines, or than Ellen Terry seems to have done.
Such things are to be understood, but I cannot mention Edward Askew Sothern without recording the fact that to his intimate friends he was ever the most consistent, affectionate, and generous of men. At the hospitable table of Henry Irving I once met the famous American tragedian, the late John M'Cullough. Turning to me in the course of the evening, he said: "I am told you are a close friend of Ned Sothern's;" and when I answered "Yes," he said, as if it were a matter of course, "Then you love him."
And that of all men who really knew him well was true.
But if in Sothern Ellen Terry chanced to find an uncongenial fellow-actor, in another member of the Haymarket Company she made a friend, destined to play with her in some of her greatest subsequent triumphs. This was that grand old actor, Henry Howe, "dear old Mr. Howe," as she calls him, who was a staunch member of the once celebrated band of Haymarket comedians for forty years.
Howe played the part of father to "the little treasure"; his kindly, winsome ways at once won her sympathy, and in the now forgotten play no scene was more successful than that in which the supposed parent and child, moved by the pathos of each other's acting, united in genuine tears.
Macready aptly described Charles Kemble as a first-rate actor of second-rate parts, and the same somewhat lukewarm praise may be attributed to Henry Howe; but he was an actor who lent distinction to his profession, and his honoured memory should surely be kept green.