Those two five-letter names have meant much to thousands, from the time they were children until they were middle-aged, or past middle-age. Macaulay’s nephew and biographer wrote of Kate Terry (the eldest of the Terry sisters) in 1852 : ‘It is almost worth while to be past middle life in order to have seen Miss Kate Terry in Arthur’ : countless others, born in mid or later Victorian times, feel the same, in regard to Ellen Terry, as they recall the beautiful voice and acting which made real and living to us Ophelia, Portia, Juliet, Beatrice, and Desdemona, and it is pleasant to reflect that those of a much younger generation have had the advantage of enjoying the greatness and variety of her gifts in the parts of Lady Macbeth (when she made us understand the relentless conscience and the human element yet alive in Lady Macbeth), of Cordelia, of Imogen, and of Volumnia.

To very many of us, her acting was not only a first revelation of Shakespeare, but, often, a realising of human character one could never have realised or found out for oneself. It is difficult to believe she could ever have had such far-reaching influence as an actress, if she had not been the woman she was; for none other of the Fine Arts so much as the art of acting seems to call for such a keen perception of the tragedy and the humour of life, of the sorrows of the world, its happiness, and its mirth, for all that we mean by the vague terms sensibility, and imagination.