Note 85 — ELLEN TERRY

Yet, characteristically, she was better satisfied than some of her admirers: “I have sometimes wondered,” she wrote, “what I should have accomplished without Henry Irving. I might have had ‘bigger’ parts but it doesn’t follow that they would have been better ones, and if they had been written by contemporary dramatists my success would have been less durable. ‘No actor or actress who doesn’t play in the classics—in Shakespeare or old comedy—will be heard of long,’ was one of Henry Irving’s statements, and he was right.”