age if it were not so obviously a picture, with no more malice than
there is in the delicate lines and fine colours of a picture. The figure
is at once Punch and the oldest of the Chelsea pensioners; it distracts
one between pity, terror, and disgust, but is altogether absorbing; one
watches it as one would watch some feeble ancient piece of mechanism,
still working, which may snap at any moment. In such a personation,
make-up becomes a serious part of art. It is the picture that magnetises
us, and every wrinkle seems to have been studied in movement; the hands
act almost by themselves, as if every finger were a separate actor. The
passion of fear, the instinct of craft, the malady of suspicion, in a
frail old man who has power over every one but himself: that is what Sir
Henry Irving represents, in a performance which is half precise
physiology, half palpable artifice, but altogether a unique thing in
art.

See him in "The Merchant of Venice." His Shylock is noble and sordid,
pathetic and terrifying. It is one of his great parts, made up of pride,
stealth, anger, minute and varied picturesqueness, and a diabolical
subtlety. Whether he paws at his cloak, or clutches upon the handle of
his stick, or splutters hatred, or cringes before his prey, or shakes
with lean and wrinkled laughter, he is always the great part and the
great actor. See him as Mephistopheles in "Faust." The Lyceum
performance was a superb pantomime, with one overpowering figure
drifting through it and in some sort directing it, the red-plumed devil
Mephistopheles, who, in Sir Henry Irving's impersonation of him, becomes
a kind of weary spirit, a melancholy image of unhappy pride, holding
himself up to the laughter of inferior beings, with the old
acknowledgment that "the devil is an ass." A head like the head of
Dante, shown up by coloured lights, and against chromolithographic
backgrounds, while all the diabolic intelligence is set to work on the