CHAPTER V
KATE TERRY
Now that Ellen Terry has for a time said good-bye to the stage that so sorely missed her, I may pause to glance at the brilliant career of her elder sister Kate, who had been, as we have seen, the constant comrade of her 'prentice days. Apart from her conspicuous successes in the youthful Shakespearean characters at the Princess's, she had, before her engagement at that house came to an end, made a profound impression by the purity and pathos of her acting as Cordelia (she was a very young Cordelia) to the King Lear of Charles Kean. This was in the April of 1858. Even at that early age she had, as the saying goes, "arrived," and would no doubt have been promptly secured by any of the then existing London managers. But, wise in his generation, and conscious of his daughter's conspicuous talents, her father decided that she must have more practice before taking that place on the boards to which she should become entitled.
It is interesting to show here one of the Charles Kean play-bills in which Kate Terry figured. To-day it reads curiously as the programme of a fashionable West End theatre.
PRINCESS'S THEATRE,
OXFORD STREET.
Under the Management of
Mr Charles Kean,
No. 3 Torrington Square.