"I had but to walk over to Carll’s Opera House, where in one season or another I might see the great contemporary actors: Booth and Barrett, Irving and Terry, Modjeska or Bernhardt, or Joe Jefferson (a favorite of the students). It may have been in New York that I first saw the elder Salvini in the role of Othello. Was it then or later that Gilbert and Sullivan’s operas came to town? I thank God that the visual age was in the far distance when novels and plays were to be washed out with pictures on a screen."