It is difficult to call to mind any situation in any play more
genuinely affecting in its simplicity than this. The audience is
held spell-bound,--yet, for my part, I should have welcomed a greater
variety in tone and action.

[Illustration: Ellen Terry as Kate.]

Miss ELLEN TERRY's _Queen Katharine_ is a "very woman." You can see
how she has caught the King, and how she still holds him. She loves
him, actually loves him, to the last to respect him is impossible, but
she respects herself; and it is just this love for him, for what he
was, not what he is, and her respect for herself, which Miss ELLEN
TERRY marks so forcibly. _Katharine_ is a foreigner, therefore is
her bearing, though stately, less stolid than that of the typical
English Tragedy Queen. The note of her dying scene, so striking by
its simplicity, is its perfect tranquillity. Who's _Griffith_? Why
the veteran HOWE (ah, Howe, When and Where did I first see you,
Sir? Wasn't it in the days when good old Mortonian farces were the
attraction at the Haymarket?) is "_the_ safe man," and excellently
well did he deliver his epitaph on _Wolsey_. But all are good, not
forgetting our old friend the sterling, that is the ARTHUR STIRLING
actor as _Cranmer_, and the youthful GILLIE FARQUHAR, unrecognisable
as _Lord Sands_, looking as ancient as if he were The Sands of Time.

This revival is bound to have a long--it may be an unprecedentedly
long--run. All of us dearly love a show. Moreover, 'tis educational;
and the School Board should issue an Examination-paper on the history
of HENRY THE EIGHTH and his times as exemplified by Mr. IRVING & CO.
at the Lyceum.