had been constructed. In the first act he sang a drinking song to a wing
accompaniment delightfully, adding much to the tone and color of the
situation. The exact reversal of the Lear suggestion in the last act was an
inspiration, his own and not Boucicault's. The weird scene in the mountains
fell in admirably with a certain weird note in the Jefferson genius, and
supplied the needed element of variety.

I always thought it a good acting play under any circumstances, but, in
his hands, matchless. He thought himself that the piece, as a piece, and
regardless of his own acting, deserved better of the critics than they were
always willing to give it. Assuredly, no drama that ever was written, as he
played it, ever took such a hold upon the public. He rendered it to three
generations, and to a rising, not a falling, popularity, drawing to the
very last undiminished audiences.

Because of this unexampled run he was sometimes described by unthinking
people as a one-part actor. Nothing could be farther from the truth. He
possessed uncommon versatility. That after twenty years of the new Rip Van
Winkle, when he was past fifty years of age, he could come back to such
parts as Caleb Plummer and Acres is proof of this. He need not have done so
at all. Carrying a pension roll of dependents aggregating fifteen or twenty
thousand a year for more than a quarter of a century, Rip would still have
sufficed his requirements. It was his love for his art that took him to The
Cricket and The Rivals, and at no inconsiderable cost to himself.

I have heard ill-natured persons, some of them envious actors, say that he
did nothing for the stage.

He certainly did not make many contributions to its upholstery. He was in
no position to emulate Sir Henry Irving in forcing and directing the public