It was a dark week-end for the English stage which
took from it at once Lady Tree and Miss Horniman. Of the two losses the latter is the greater. Lady Tree was a great actress—very much more than merely Sir Herbert's wife— but she set no particular mark on stage history. Miss Horniman was a landmark, not only, nor indeed primarily, in the history of the English stage, for it was to the Abbey Theatre at Dublin that what were perhaps her greatest services were rendered. A woman of means—thanks to the success of the well-known tea firm of which her father, for long a Liberal M.P., was the head—she set the Abbey Theatre going and started the great tradition with which the names of J. M. Synge and Yeats and Lady Gregory and Lennox Robinson are inseparably associated. Then came the Gaiety Theatre at Manchester. At the Gaiety the repertory theatre movement which has since spread so far and so beneficially had its birth. I saw The Silver Box there close on thirty years ago. Hindle Wakes, one of the first contributions to the school of Lancashire drama which Miss Horniman did so much to bring into being and keep alive, came a little later. The Companionship of Honour which she shares with Miss Lilian Baylis (the only representa- tives of drama in the Order) was an award abundantly deserved.
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