"Will you come in our box on Tuesday for Queen Mary? Ever yours,

"CHARLES T. COGHLAN.

"P.S.--I am afraid that they will soon have to smooth their wrinkled
front of the P. of W. Alas! Hélas! Ah, me!"

This postscript, I think, must have referred to the approaching
withdrawal of "Wrinkles" from the Prince of Wales's, and the return of
Coghlan and myself to the cast.

Meanwhile, we went to see Irving's King Philip.

Well, I can only say that he never did anything better to the day of his
death. Never shall I forget his expression and manner when Miss Bateman,
as Queen Mary (she was _very_ good, by the way), was pouring out her
heart to him. The horrid, dead look, the cruel unresponsiveness, the
indifference of the creature! While the poor woman protested and wept,
he went on polishing up his ring! Then the tone in which he asked:

"Is dinner ready?"

It was the perfection of quiet malignity and cruelty.

The extraordinary advance that he had made since the days when we had
acted together at the Queen's Theater did not occur to me. I was just
spellbound by a study in cruelty, which seemed to me a triumphant
assertion of the power of the actor to create as well as to interpret,
for Tennyson never suggested half what Henry Irving did.