actness of his judgment. Goldsmith describes a French actor, while exhibiting an ungovernable rage as the hero of the comedy l'Avare, betraying the avariciousness of Harpagon's disposition by stooping suddenly to pick up a pin and quilting it in the flap of his coatpocket with great assiduity. "Two candles are lighted up for his wedding; he flies and extinguishes one; it is, how ever, lighted up again; he then steals to it and privately crams it into his pocket." A representation of the Mock Doctor was also commended. "Here again the comedian had an opportunity of heightening the ridicule by action. The French player sits in a chair with a high back, and then begins to show away by talking nonsense which he would have thought Latin by those who do not understand a syllable of the matter. At last he grows enthusiastic, enjoys the admiration of the company, tosses his legs and arms about, and, in the midst of his raptures and vociferation, he and the chair fall back together." If this should be thought dull in the recital, it is urged that the gravity of Cato could not stand it in the representation," and that there hardly existed a character in comedy to which a player of real humor could not add strokes of vivacity such as would secure great applause. Instead of this, however, the fine gentlemen of the theatre were wont through a whole part to do nothing but strut and open their snuffboxes; while the pretty fellows sat with their legs crossed, and the clowns pulled up their breeches. These proceedings, the critic concludes, if once or even twice repeated, might do well enough; "but to see them served up in every scene argues the actor almost as barren as the character he would expose."

nounced to be "excessively engaging." She did not come in glancing round and staring at the audience as though she was reckoning the receipts, or intended to see as well as to be seen. Her eyes were first fixed upon the other persons in the play, then gradually turned “with enchanting diffidence" upon the spectators. Her first words were delivered with scarcely any motion of the arm : "her hands and her tongue never set out together; the one prepared us for the other." She sometimes began with a mute eloquent attitude; but she never advanced all at once with hands, eyes, head, and voice." By a simple beginning she gave herself "the power of rising in the passion of the scene." As she proceeded, her every gesture, every look, acquired new violence, till at last transported she filled "the whole vehemence of the part and all the idea of the poet." Her hands were not alternately stretched out and then drawn in again as with the singing women at Sadler's Wells," but employed with graceful variety; every moment they pleased with new and unexpected eloquence. And further, she did not flourish her hands while the upper part of her arm was motionless, nor had she the ridiculous appearance as if her elbows were pinned to her hips."

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Goldsmith particularly recommends "our rising actresses," of all the cautions to be given them, never to take notice of the audience upon any occasion whatsoever; he could not pardon a lady upon the stage who, when she attracted the admiration of the spectators, turned about to make them a low curtsey for their applause. "Such a figure no longer continues Belvidere, but at once drops into Mrs. Cibber." Let the audience applaud ever so loudly, their praises should pass, except at the end of the epilogue, with seeming inattention. But the while the critic advised "skilful attention to gestures," he deprecated study of it in the looking-glass. This, without some precaution, would render their action formal, stiff, and affected. People seldom improved when they had no other model but themselves to copy from. And he records his remembrance of a notable actor "who made great use of his flattering monitor, and yet was one of the stiffest figures ever seen."

His apartment was hung round with looking-glasses, that he might see his person twenty times reflected upon entering the room; "and I will make bold to say he saw twenty very ugly fellows when he did so.'

No doubt the harlequin of the present time, if a less valued and important personage than his exemplar, has preserved certain of the traditions of Rich's harlequin, while various of Rich's postures and gestures which Garrick was said to have imported into stage dialogue may still linger in the theatre. The manners, even the mannerisms, of a popular actor become popular in their turn, and are imitated and adopted by his successors. The admired comedian Robert Wilks had, we are informed, a certain peculiar custom of pulling down his ruffles and rolling his stockings; assuredly a later generation of actors pulled down their ruffles and rolled their stockings precisely after Mr. Wilks's manner, just as there are players of to-day who retain the late Charles Mathews's lively habit of adjusting his side locks, his cravat and his wrist-bands, of putting on and off his gloves, etc., resembling him in those respects, if in none other. Leigh Hunt writes of Lewis, the favorite comedian of eighty or ninety years since, that "he drew on his gloves like a gentleman, and then darted his fingers at the ribs of the character he was talking with in a way that carried with it whatever was suggestive and sparkling and amusing." The stage has known since Lewis's time very much darting of fingers at the ribs of the characters. The elder Mathews's method of expressing the irritability of Sir Fretful Plagiary by taking furious pinches of snuff and by frequent buttoning and unbuttoning of his doublebreasted coat is not yet lost to the theatre. Concerning Munden's variety and significance of grimace and gesture Leigh Hunt grows eloquent. The actor was said to make something out of nothing by his singular" intensity of contemplation. He would play the part of a vagabond loiterer about inn-doors, would look at and for ten minutes together gradually approach from a distance a pot of ale on a table, the while he kept the house in roars of laughter by the intense idea which he dumbly conveyed of

Stage gestures acquire, no doubt, a rather stereotyped character, and those who profess to teach acting are apt to inculcate very conventional forms of histrionic expression. The action that is to accompany the word is subject to many rules and limitations. Charles Dickens, who wrote disrespectfully of the Théâtre Français as an establishment devoted to a dreary classicality"a kind of tomb where you went as the Eastern people did in the stories to think of your unsuccessful loves and dead relations" especially condemned the gestures employed even by its leading performers. Between ourselves, even one's best friends there"-he was thinking of Regnier, perhaps-" are at times very aggravating. One tires of seeing a man, through any number of acts, remembering everything by patting his forehead with the flat of his hand, jerking out sentences by shaking himself and piling them up in pyramids over his head with his right forefinger. And they have a general small-comedy piece," he continues, where you see two sofas and three little tables, to which a man enters with his hat on, to talk to another man

and in respect of which you know exactly when he will get up from one sofa to sit on the other, and take his hat off one table to put his hat upon the other which strikes one quite as ludicrously as a good farce.'

It is clear that a certain forfeiture of dignity must result from too literal a system of illustrative gesture. Cibber's personation of Wolsey was much ap

ers.

It seems that with his thumb and forefinger, or with his first and second fingers, he imitated the manner of extinguishing a candle by means of a pair of snuffGenest writes: "One must lament that Shakespeare should have used a metaphor so unworthy of him, but surely, the actor should rather endeavor to sink the thing than to bring it peculiarly into notice;" and he proceeds to record that when Young played Wolsey he folded his arms the while he delivered the passage and slurred the metaphor completely, evincing in this respect better judgment than Kemble, who, although he did not, like Cibber, pretend to ply the snuffers, yet elevated and wrinkled his grand nose and assumed a disgusted expression, as though the departed candle had left behind it an unpleasant odor. Much discussion arose concerning Kemble's action as Hamlet, when, denouncing the slanders he was reading, he tore the page from the book to demonstrate his bad opinion of the satirical rogue the author; and Macready's waving aloft of a cambric handkerchief by way of expressing Hamlet's intentions to be idle" may almost be viewed as the direful spring of woes unnumbered." Edwin Forest derided the proceeding, described it as a pas de mouchoir, even hissed it; and a feeling of enmity was engendered between the two tragedians which so spread and strengthened as to acquire almost the importance of a national conflict, and terminated in the great New York riot of 1849.

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"Look you whether he has not turned his color and has tears in his eyes," remarks Polonius of the First Player, and his recitation; and Hamlet also comments upon the waned visage of the actor, the tears in his eyes, his distracted aspect, broken voice, etc. Tears do not rarely visit the eyes of the players, who are moved to sympathy by their own simulations and are able to force their souls as to their own conceits. It is not so much that they are convinced by the familiar Horatian counsel, Si vis

me flere, etc.: a proneness to tears is rather a constitutional faculty or failing which players share with playgoers, novel-readers, auditors of poetry, sermons, speeches, etc. But can the actor discharge the color from his countenance otherwise than prosaically by rubbing the rouge off? There is extant a description of Betterton's performance of Hamlet which describes the actor, although naturally of a ruddy and sanguine complexion, as turning pale as his own neckcloth instantly upon the appearance of the ghost. His whole body seemed to be affected with a tremor inexpressible, so that had his father's ghost actually risen before him he could not have been seized with more real agonies. And this was felt so strongly by the audience that the blood seemed to curdle in their veins likewise," etc. An American critic has left a curious account of the "unique and inimitable method" of the late Junius Brutus Booth, and his extraordinary "control over the vital and involuntary functions." We are informed that the actor could "tremble from head to foot, or tremble in one outstretched arm to the finger-tips while holding it in the firm grasp of the other hand. The veins of his corded and magnificent neck would swell, and the whole throat and face become suffused with crimson in a moment, in the crisis of passion, to be succeeded on the ebb of feeling by an ashy paleness. To throw the blood into the face is a comparatively easy feat for a sanguine man by simply holding the breath; but for a man of pale complexion to speak passionate and thrilling words pending the suffusion is quite another thing. On the other hand, it must be observed that no amount of merely physical exertion or exercise of voice could bring color into that pale proud intellectual face. In a word, he commanded his own pulses, as well as the pulses of his auditors, with most despotic ease.

From his early practice in pantomime Edmund Kean derived, no doubt, much of the ease and grace of attitude and gesture he displayed as a tragedian. Hazlitt specially commends the actor's impressive and Titanesque postures, yet objects to the gesture he employed as Iago in the last scene of Othello, when