/24 3.23 8 HARVARD COLLEGE SEP 30 1886 GIBSON BROS., PRINTERS, Copyright, 1886, By MARY AGNES SIDDONS. DEDICATED WITH PROFOUND RESPECT ΤΟ MR. HENRY IRVING. IN PREFERENCE TO ANY DEDICATORY LANGUAGE OF MY OWN, I USE THE JUST AND BRILLIANT TRIBUTE PAID TO HIM BY THE LONDON TELEGRAPH, WHICH SAYS: "We hold of Mr. Henry Irving that during his career of management he has brought Shakespeare home to the people through the public presentation of his plays. Instead of destroying the garden he has cleared it of weeds. The Shakespeare of the stage has often been vulgarized by careless managers and vain actors. Some enemy in the night has sown tares among the wheat. By careful husbandry the Lyceum manager has cleared the crop of its noxious undergrowth. The heresies of David Garrick and Colley Cibber have disappeared from the best known of the Shakespearian plays, and no one can honestly say that in any of Mr. Irving's stage versions, however beautiful in colour, glowing in dress, or superb in panorama, he has ever rejected one beautiful thought, ever crushed one vital scene, or ever wilfully suppressed or mutilated one sublime passage. He has restored far more than he has omitted, and in the aftertime people will own, who have carefully followed his truly national work, that he, as much if not more than any English manager, has made Shakespeare understood, appreciated, and loved by his countrymen." PREFACE. A love and veneration for Shakespeare's immortal creations, and a familiarity with the mass of literature they have inspired, and which has found its expressions in every conceivable form, in every country, and in every language of the globe, for the past three hundred years, will be conceded by the reader to the author of the following pages. A pure taste, a rare talent for research, a liberal education, which included the study of humanity in many of its abstract principles, as well as in its intellectual phases, will also be appreciated by the thoughtful scholar and ardent student of Shakespeare. A mind of such order, with a singular industry as to time and opportunity, together with a memory as tenacious and clear at eighty-five as at eighteen, are certainly possessions of no mean value, and should at least entitle the owner to a full share of public confidence in any work which he might see fit to publish. Such a store of knowledge, gleaned from such rich fields of thought before and after other reapers had reaped, that no grain of fact or fancy should be lost by which his gift to posterity could be enriched, has been a cherished object for many years of Mr. Siddons' life. But, alas! the hands which should have rounded to symmetry the work as it passed through the press are forever at rest. Death, the mighty gleaner of all mortal life, has used his scythe. Still, the deep regret expressed by those interested in the labors of Mr. Siddons, that the present work must pass from the press without the valuable aid which his correction would give to his book, must not lead us, however, to forget, in our selfish disappointment, to thank those friends who, in the supreme moment of bereavement, gave their services unstintingly to the correction of proof-sheets, and to forward in every way the object which the author held so dear at heart, namely, the production of the Shakespearian Referee. |