The friendship between Henry Irving and John L. Toole was literally lifelong. It began close on fifty years ago, when Irving was eighteen and Toole nine years older. Toole was then a local semi-star at the old Theatre Royal, Edinburgh, whilst Irving was just beginning his stage career and playing small speaking parts; but the two men singled each other out, and there and then began a truly brotherly friendship, which not only lasted unbroken all their lives, but grew ever closer with the waning years. The two men seemed to supplement each other’s natures. Each had, in his own way and of its own kind, a great sense of humour. Toole’s genial, ebullient, pronounced; Irving’s saturnine, keen, and suggestive. Both had—each again in his own way—a very remarkable seriousness. Those who only saw Toole in his inimitable pranks knew little how keenly the man felt emotion; how unwavering he was in his sense of duty; how earnest in his work. With Irving the humour was a fixed quantity, which all thought his life kept its relative proportion to his seriousness, but Toole, being a low-comedian, and perhaps because of it, seemed at times vastly different in his hours of work and relaxation. For it is a strange thing that the conditions of emotion are such that what is work in one case is rest in another, and vice versa, the serious man finds ease in relaxation, the humorous man seeks in quietude his rest from the stress of laughter.