in "The Wife of Socrates"; the other was Jenny O'Jones, in "Red-Letter Nights." The first of those pieces is a bit of blank-verse dialogue, written by Justin H. McCarthy, upon the basis of a French piece by Théodore de Banville. It was produced at Daly's Theatre on October 30, 1888. Miss Rehan wore a robe of golden silk and her noble, spirited head was crowned with an aureole of red hair. Xantippe, resentful of the perfect composure of Socrates, scolds and storms till, in the tempest of her passion, she is suddenly thrown into a syncope, whereupon she is thought to be dead. But while she is recovering from that swoon she hears the sorrowful, affectionate protestations of love that are uttered by her husband, and perceiving then his sincerity, devotion, and sweetness and her own unwomanlike violence and acrimony of temper, she changes from a shrew to a meek and loving woman. Miss Rehan acted that part in a strain of passionate impetuosity, and, at times, with fine sarcasm. Her elocution was uncommonly sweet. Her action was marked by incessant and piquant variety. She flashed from one mood to another, and placed many phases of the feminine nature in vivid contrast. The embodiment was one of sumptuous personal beauty, and after the storm of shrewish rage and turbulent jealousy had spent its force the portrayal closed with the suggestion of a lovely ideal of nobility and gentleness. When there is a close correspondence between the temperament

of the actor and the temperament of the part that is represented a greater freedom of expression is naturally reached. That correspondence existed in the culminating passage of that play, between Miss Rehan and the conquered Xantippe, and the success of the actress was brilliant. In dealing with the shrewish aspect of the part she obeyed the same subtle impulse that she had wisely followed in her treatment of Shakespeare's Katharine: the dress was made to harmonize with the spirit of its wearer. Her shrew was red-haired, highcolored, and like a scorching flame. Set against that brilliant embodiment, Jenny O'Jones, a farcical episode, inspired a sentiment of wonder that the same woman should be able to invest with a suitable body two such utterly divergent, contrasted persons. The character was made by Daly and written by him into his version of a German play, which he named "Red-Letter Nights." In that scene Miss Rehan, representing an amiable though wild and mischievous girl, was constrained to adopt the same expedient that Letitia Hardy chooses, in "The Belle's Stratagem," though with a different purpose. Being sought in marriage by a disagreeable old man, the heroine pretends to be a slatternly hoyden, and her singing of a song about Jenny O'Jones, which she declares to contain more than a hundred verses, all of which are alike, discomfits the obnoxious applicant and puts him to flight. It is a violent expedient of humor, it is much as if Rosa

lind should pretend to be Audrey,-but it is exceedingly droll, and, seeing that the actress whose art could touch such extremes of character and of poetry as Katharine and Rosalind, Ophelia and Peggy Thrift, Julia and Marian Lea, Beatrice and Miranda, could also create and sustain an illusion in the domain of downright broad farce, the observer was naturally impressed by the rare and fine talent which distinctively marks an actor, the capability of impersonation. It was that faculty, authenticated and made irresistible by personal charm, that made Ada Rehan a leader in her profession, and that prompts and justifies commemoration of the grace, humor, tenderness, and beauty of her acting and the auspicious worth of her artistic powers.

Ada Rehan obtained a triumphant success as Letitia Hardy. Her portrayal of Letitia's assumed awkwardness was easily perfect. Her adroit use of the Milkmaid song cast a glow of delicious humor, commingled with the perplexing spell of latent refinement, over that image of rosy rusticity, and it was quite possible to sympathize with Doricourt's bewilderment when he said that he had seen in her eyes an expression that seemed to mock the folly of her lips. The essential attribute of Letitia Hardy is feminine fascination, and that was imparted by Ada Rehan to every fibre of the embodiment. In the Masquerade Scene the victorious air was sustained with inflexible refinement and undeviating grace, and those exquisite speeches about the ideal

woman,―so easily spoiled, so difficult to deliver,-came off in the rippling tones of one of the most musical voices ever heard on our Stage. In demeanor, likewise, in the preservation of stateliness and high-bred isolation, the actress was at her best and unimpeachable. No one of her predecessors as Letitia Hardy,-looking back as far as the springtime of Julia Bennett Barrow, -acted the part with a more intrinsic loftiness of womanlike spirit, with more dignity and grace of bearing, or with a more fortunate assumption of rustic silliness in the Hoyden Scene, and no one of them made it so essentially diffusive of womanlike allurement. In that particular the characteristic embodiments of Miss Rehan have seldom been equalled. The secret of that allurement is elusive. Among its elements are passionate sincerity, the manifest capability of imparting great happiness, triumphant personal beauty, which yet is touched and softened by a wistful and sympathetic sadness, and that controlling and compelling instinct, essentially feminine, which endows with vital import every experience of love, and creates a perfect illusion in scenes of fancied bliss or woe. The piquant aspect of the character of Letitia Hardy was heightened and made the more delightful in Miss Rehan's impersonation because of the emphasis that she laid upon its gravity, making the personality genuine and imparting to Letitia's stratagem a momentous importance. In actual life no woman ever really approves of levity and laughter over affairs of the heart.

Miss Rehan's

Those, to women, are serious things, and throughout all her performances in artificial comedy, whether old or new, Miss Rehan was specially felicitous in her fidelity to that instinct of earnest womanhood. The common practice of the stage has been, in such characters as Letitia, to aim only at sparkle and dash. The victorious excellence and artistic superiority of assumption were obvious in its union of glittering impetuosity and merry witchery with true passion, womanlike tenderness of heart, and the many sweet ways and innocent wiles with which a loving woman involuntarily commends herself to the object of her love. The embodiment was not a frolic, but a round, coherent, truthful, fascinating portrayal of human nature.

On the same night when Ada Rehan first appeared as Letitia Hardy she also acted Mockworld, in a fanciful, romantic play, by Miss Clo Graves, called "The Knave." The character is a picturesque vagabond. The scene is a town in Germany. The vagabond has saved a lovely girl from a mediæval tyrannical nobleman, and has subjected that potentate to humiliation and disgrace, and, thereupon, the tyrant has issued a proclamation dooming him to death. It is near the end of a summer day when that chivalric outlaw drifts into the marketplace of the town, where the written mandate of his doom has just been displayed. He is asked to read it, since no one else then present can read, and he does read it, with slight variations, and, though suspected,