Except when HENRY IRVING impersonated the hapless victim of false imprisonment in the Bastille, whence he issued forth after twenty years of durance, never has he been so curiously and wonderfully made-up as now, when he represents Lear, monarch of all he surveys.  Bless thee, HENRY, how art thou transformed!

[Illustration:  Rather mixed.  Mr. Irving as “Ophe-Lear.”]

Sure such a King Lear was never seen on any stage, so perfect in appearance, so entirely the ideal of SHAKSPEARE’S ancient King.  It must have been a vision of IRVING in this character that the divinely-inspired poet and dramatist saw when he had a Lear in his eye.  For a moment, too, he reminded me of BOOTH—­the “General,” not the “particular” American tragedian,—­and when he appeared in thunder, lightning, hail, and rain, he suggested an embodiment of the “Moses” of MICHAEL ANGELO.

A strange weird play; much for an audience, and more for an actor, all on his own shoulders, to bear.  A one-part play it is too, for of the sweet Cordelia,—­and sweet did ELLEN TERRY look and so tenderly did she play!—­little is seen or heard.  With Goneril and Regan, the two proud and wicked sisters,—­associated in the mind of the modernest British Public with Messrs. HERBERT CAMPBELL and HARRY NICHOLLS, as is also Cordelia associated either with Cinderella or with Beauty in the story of Beauty and the Beast—­we have two fine commanding figures; and well are these parts played by Miss ADA DYAS and Miss MAUD MILTON.  The audience can have no sympathy with the two wicked Princesses, and except in Goneril’s brief Lady-Macbethian scene with her husband, neither of the Misses LEAR has much dramatic chance.  Pity that Mrs. LEAR—­his Queen and their mother, wasn’t alive!  Let us hope she resembled her youngest daughter Cordelia, otherwise poor Lear must have had a hard life of it as a married man.

Why should not Mr. IRVING give the first part of this play reconsideration?  Why not just once a week try him as a different sort of Lear?  For instance, suppose, to begin with, that he had had a bad time of it with his wife, that for many years as a widower he had been seeking for the opportunity of disposing of his daughters, handing over to them and to their husbands the lease and goodwill of “The Crown and Sceptre,” while he would be, as King, “retired from business,” and going out for a lark generally.  Thus jovially would he commence the play, a rollicking, gay, old dog, ready for anything, up to anything, and, like old Anchises, when he jumped on to the back of AEneas, “a wonderful man for his years.”  In fact, Lear might begin like an old King Cole, “a merry old soul,” a “jolly old cock!” And then—­“Oh, what a difference in the morning!”—­when all his plans for a gay career had been shipwrecked by Cordelia’s capricious and unnatural affectation.