“During the early days of my association with Mr. Frohman at the Lyceum Theatre much of my time was occupied with my duties in connection with Franklin Sargent’s Dramatic School. Mr. Sargent had leased the classroom, hall and stage, which Steele Mackaye had designed when the Lyceum Theatre was built. I am very proud to give the names of some of the pupils who made up my classes: Alice Fischer, Blanche Walsh, Charles Bellows, Maude Banks, George Fawcett, Harriet Ford, Emma Sheridan, Dorothy Dorr, Wilfred Buckland, George Foster Platt, Jennie Eustace, Grace Kimball, Cora Maynard, William Ordway Partridge, Robert Taber, Lincoln Wagnalls, E. Wales Winter, White Whittlesey, and Edith Chapman. This list stands as a refutation of the statement that the school of acting is not of benefit in preparing for the stage....

“A graphic picture of Robert Taber’s successful and almost superhuman effort to overcome his physical disadvantages will remain with me always. One day, as I sat in my studio, he limped in—pale, delicate—almost an invalid in appearance. An illness in childhood had left him with a shortened leg, so that he was obliged to wear a shoe with a sole at least two inches thick. After introducing himself, he told me of his ambition. ’Do you think I can possibly become an actor with these?’ he asked, pointing to his bent knee and drooping shoulder. The tragic pathos in his face aroused my sympathy and I asked him to read to me. All his selections were from the old classics, which he loved,—like many another youth I have met, with the spell of the stage upon him. So he read to me scenes from ’King Richard III,’ ’Julius CÆsar,’ and ’Romeo and Juliet.’ His reading was distinct, his interpretations spirited. A flash of genius ran through the fibre of the boy; there was strength and impressiveness in his delivery. He was thoroughly exhausted when he had finished, and I was in a quandary. ’Surely I can’t lengthen his leg,’ I thought; ’yet he wants to play juvenile leads; he wants to play Romeo!’ I saw at once that Robert Taber was not fitted to be a pantaloon actor, a parlor figure, for there was a flourish and breadth to his style of delivery that dedicated him to the costume play.

“He must have seen the perplexity in my face, for he said: ’Mr. Belasco, I can raise $20,000, which you can have if you will help me. You have assisted stammerers!’ I couldn’t tell him that a limp was a different matter. Nevertheless, I resolved to see what I could do for him. ’I’ll not take a cent of your money,’ I said, ’but if you will do as I tell you, we’ll see what can be done.’ He agreed and there followed a regular campaign against a limp. It was my idea to eliminate the defect through exercises. He worked faithfully. He walked, he lay on his back, practising stretching exercises; he studied the balancing of his body, throwing the weight so that his short leg could be brought down slowly to the floor, without any perceptible stooping of the shoulders. I had a shoe made, with a deep inner sole, to take the place of the unsightly shoe he wore when he first called upon me. After a year of daily work, when he was ready to enter the school of acting, his limp was so slight that it was barely perceptible! When he became leading man for Julia Marlowe, whom he afterwards married, who could have detected his deformity? His is a most remarkable instance, and I have often recalled it. For it is an example of what ambition and perseverance can accomplish, but few artists would be willing to practise the self-denial and go through such rigorous training.” [Robert Taber was born in Staten Island, New York, in 1865, and he died, of consumption, in the Adirondacks, in 1904.—W. W.]