apital
specimen of it. But here and there occur passages which, when one hears
the play acted, have all the vast Shakespearian sense of effect.

----To hear the piteous moans that Edward made
When black-faced Clifford shook his sword at him.

It is hard to believe that Shakespeare did not write that. And when
Richard, after putting an end to Clarence, comes into Edward IV.'s
presence, with the courtiers ranged about, and announces hypocritically
that Providence has seen fit to remove him, the situation is marked by
one or two speeches which are dramatic as Shakespeare alone is dramatic.
The immediate exclamation of the Queen--

All-seeing heaven, what a world is this!

--followed by that of one of the gentlemen--

Look _I_ so pale, Lord Dorset, as the rest?

--such touches as these, with their inspired vividness, seem to belong
to the brushwork of the master. Mr. Irving gives the note of his
performance in his first speech--the famous soliloquy upon "the winter
of our discontent." His delivery of these lines possesses little but
hopeless staginess and mannerism. It seems indeed like staginess gone
mad. The spectator rubs his eyes and asks himself whether he has not
mistaken his theatre, and stumbled by accident upon some prosperous
burlesque. It is fair to add that Mr. Irving is here at his worst, the
scene offering him his most sustained and exacting piece of
declamation. But the way he renders it is the way he renders the whole
part--slowly, draggingly, diffusively, with innumerable pauses and
lapses, and without a hint of the rapidity, the intensity and _entrain_
which are needful for carrying off the improbabilities of so explicit
and confidential a villain and so melodramatic a hero.

Just now, when a stranger in London asks where the best acting is to be
seen, he receives one of two answers. He is told either at the Prince
of Wales's theatre or at the Court. Some people think that the last
perfection is to be found at the former of these establishments, others
at the latter. I went first to the Prince of Wales's, of which I had a
very pleasant memory from former years, and I was not disappointed. The
acting is very pretty indeed, and this little theatre doubtless
deserves the praise which is claimed for it, of being the best
conducted English stage in the world. It is, of course, not the Comedie
Francaise; but, equally of course, it is absurd talking or thinking of
the Comedie Francaise in