Henry’s pride as Cardinal Wolsey seemed to eat him. How wonderful he looked (though not fat and self-indulgent like the pictures of the real Wolsey) in his flame-coloured robes! He had the silk dyed specially by the dyers to the Cardinals’ College in Rome. Seymour Lucas designed the clothes. It was a magnificent production, but not very interesting to me. I played Katherine much better ten years later at Stratford-on-Avon at the Shakespeare Memorial Festival. I was stronger then, and more mature. This letter from Burne-Jones about “Henry VIII.” and Henry Irving is delightful. I will not keep it to myself any longer:

“My dear Lady,

“We went last night to the play (at my Theatre) to see ‘Henry VIII.’ Margaret and Mackail and I. It was delicious to go out again and see mankind, after such evil days. How kind they were to me no words can say—I went in at a private door and then into a cosy box and back the same way, swiftly, and am marvellously the better for the adventure. No you, alas!

“I have written to Mr. Irving just to thank him for his great kindness in making the path of pleasure so easy, for I go tremblingly at present. But I could not say to him what I thought of the Cardinal—a sort of shame keeps one from saying to an artist what one thinks of his work—but to you I can say how nobly he warmed up the story of the old religion to my exacting mind in that impersonation. I shall think always of dying monarchy in his Charles—and always of dying hierarchy in his Wolsey. How Protestant and dull all grew when that noble type had gone!

“I can’t go to Church till red cardinals come back (and may they be of exactly that red), nor to Court till trumpets and banners come back—nor to evening parties till the dances are like that dance. What a lovely young Queen has been found. But there was no you.... Perhaps it was as well. I couldn’t have you slighted even in a play, and put aside. When I go back to see you as I soon will, it will be easier. Mr. Irving let me know you would not act; and proposed that I should go later on—wasn’t that like him? So I sat with my children and was right happy, and as usual the streets looked dirty and all the people muddy and black as we came away. Please not to answer this stuff.

“Ever yours aff’ly,

“E. B. J.

“I wish that Cardinal could have been made Pope, and sat with his foot on the Earl of Surrey’s neck. Also I wish to be a Cardinal, but then I sometimes want to be a pirate. We can’t have all we want.

“Your boy was very kind—I thought the race of young men who are polite and attentive to old fading ones had passed away with antique pageants—but it isn’t so.”

When the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire gave the famous fancy-dress ball at Devonshire House, they attended it in the robes which had appealed so strongly to Burne-Jones’s imaginative eye. I was told by one who was present at this ball that, as the Cardinal swept up the staircase, his long train held magnificently over his arm, a sudden wave of reality seemed to sweep upstairs with him, and reduce to the pettiest make-believe all the aristocratic masquerade that surrounded him.

I renewed my acquaintance with “Henry VIII” in 1902, when I played Queen Katherine for Mr. Benson during the Shakespeare Memorial performances in April. I was pretty miserable at the time—the Lyceum reign was dying, and taking an unconscionably long time about it, which made the position all the more difficult. Henry Irving was reviving “Faust”—a wise step, as it had been his biggest “money-maker”—and it was a question whether I could play Margaret. There are some young parts that the actress can still play when she is no longer young: Beatrice, Portia, and many others come to mind. But I think that when the character is that of a young girl, the betrayal of whose innocence is the main theme of the play, no amount of skill on the part of the actress can make up for the loss of youth.

Suggestions were thrown out to me (not by Henry Irving, but by others concerned) that, although I was too old for Margaret, I might play Martha! Well! well! I didn’t quite see that. So I redeemed a promise given in jest at the Lyceum to Frank Benson twenty years earlier, and went off to Stratford-upon-Avon to play in “Henry VIII.”

I played Katherine on Shakespeare’s Birthday—such a lovely day, bright and sunny and warm. The performance went finely—and I 397 made a little speech afterwards which was quite a success.

During these pleasant days at Stratford, I went about in between the performances of “Henry VIII,” which was, I think, given three times a week for three weeks, seeing the lovely country and lovely friends who live there. A visit to Broadway and to beautiful Madame de Navarro (Mary Anderson), was particularly delightful. To see her looking so handsome, robust, fresh, so happy in her beautiful home, gave me the keenest pleasure. I also went to Stanways, the Elchos’ home—a fascinating place. Lady Elcho showed me all over it, and she was not the least lovely thing in it.

In Stratford I was rebuked by the permanent inhabitants for being kind to a little boy in professionally ragged clothing who made me, as he has made hundreds of others, listen to a long made-up history of Stratford-on-Avon, Shakespeare, “The Merchant of Venice,” “Julius Cæsar,” and other things—the most hopeless mix! The inhabitants assured me that the boy was a little rascal, who begged and extorted money from visitors by worrying them with his recitation until they paid him to leave them alone.

Long before I knew that the child was such a reprobate, I had given him a pass to the gallery and a Temple Shakespeare! I derived such pleasure from his version of the “Mercy” speech from the “Merchant of Venice” that I still think he was ill-paid!

The quality of mercy is not strange