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
taste. But he did in America quite as much as Sir Charles Wyndham and
Sir Henry Irving in England to elevate the personality, the social and
intellectual standing of the actor and the stage, effecting in a lifetime a
revolution in the attitude of the people and the clergy of both countries
to the theater and all things in it. This was surely enough for one man in
any craft or country.
He was always a good stage speaker. Late in life he began to speak
elsewhere, and finally to lecture. His success pleased him immensely. The
night of the Sunday afternoon charity for the Newsboys' Home in Louisville,
when the promise of a talk from him had filled the house to overflowing,
he was like a boy who had come off from a college occasion with all the
honors. Indeed, the degrees of Harvard and Yale, which had reached him both
unexpectedly and unsolicited, gave him a pleasure quite apart from the
vanity they might have gratified in another; he regarded them, and justly,
as the recognition at once of his profession and of his personal character.
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