induced by imaginative treatment of a mysterious subject. However prosaic the quality of a disembodied spirit may remain, it seems reasonable to assume that there must be some essential difference between the material body and the spiritual body, and the person undertaking to represent a spirit could only succeed, if at all, in denoting that difference not by stage tricks but by mental power, and affluence of emotion, by weird strangeness of individuality, by exquisite sensibility, by magnetism, and by the artistic skill to liberate those forces and so elicit and control the sympathy of his auditors. Mr. Warfield's personation of Grimm gave not the faintest intimation of spirituality, and there was not one gleam of imagination in his presentment of the spirit.

Few actors have ever succeeded in conveying to an audience any really convincing, absorbing sense of spiritual presence. The dramatist of "Peter Grimm" probably did not intend that any such sense should be conveyed. Mr. Warfield, apparently, did not attempt to convey it, and if, as appears true, it was the actor's purpose to present Grimm as essentially the same person after death as before, then his personation, undoubtedly, was the rounded result of a definite plan, and was, as such, entirely successful.

The part of Peter Grimm has been described as one of great difficulty. It is, on the contrary, very easy. Its requirement is sincerity. Grimm, as a spirit, clothed

as in mortal life, must move among persons who were his friends and acquaintances, unseen by them, unheard when he speaks, eagerly desirous to influence their conduct, but practically helpless to do so, except at moments when accession of extreme sensibility on the part of one or another of them provides occasion, until, at last, force of circumstance and the impelling guidance of the dead man achieve his purpose. Acted in the spirit precisely as in the flesh, as a good old man, the part makes no draft upon the resources of mind and feeling or upon the faculty of expression that any good actor might not easily satisfy. The situations wherein Grimm, ostensibly, is ignored by the other persons on the stage in fact revolve around him and are dependent on his presence; he engages the sympathy of the audience practically to the exclusion of all the other characters, and the almost universal interest-whether assenting or dissenting in anything relating directly to the theme of spiritual survival after death, together with the novelty of a ghost displayed in the environment of everyday, centres observation on Grimm and his per

sonator.

Mr. Warfield's performance, notwithstanding the prosaic atmosphere of it, was interesting, and his excursion into the realm of the occult was, at least, calculated to stimulate thought on a serious subject. In this, as in many other matters, the degree of approval gained by the play and its performance will ever be variably

accordant to taste. To some persons, no doubt, the ideal of a newly dead child being borne away on his spirit-uncle's shoulders, singing about "Uncle Rat has gone to town to buy his niece a wedding gown," and musically inquiring, "What shall the wedding breakfast be? Hard boiled eggs and a cup of tea?" will be delightful. Others, equally without doubt, will fail to find it impressive.

V.

FRANK WORTHING.

1866-1910.

FRANCIS GEORGE PENTLAND, who was known to the Stage as Frank Worthing, and who was admired and honored as one of its foremost and best representatives, died suddenly, just within the stage-door of the Garrick Theatre, Detroit, Michigan, on December 27, 1910, of hemorrhage from the stomach. His health had been for a considerable period impaired and his condition frail. Indeed, during the last two years of his life he had survived chiefly because of his resolute endurance. He fully realized his physical weakness and knew that his hold upon life was slender, but he was a brave, gallant gentleman; he would not burden his friends with anxiety for his welfare or cause any distress that could be averted; he was reticent: he kept his troubles to himself, and he had determined to meet the inevitable summons, undaunted, at whatever time it might come,remaining in the active practice of his profession, and falling at the post of duty. That purpose he fulfilled, dying as he would have wished to die, stanch and faithful to the last.

The life of an actor is less eventful in our time

than often it was in those old days before the profession of Acting obtained the almost universal recognition which it now enjoys, and when such a man as Edmund Kean was compelled, in the course of his travels, to swim across a river, carrying his clothing in a bundle on his head; but it is a busy and toilsome life, and it is attended by much vicissitude. The story of Frank Worthing's life is a story of persistent, continuous professional labor, prompted by honorable ambition and directed toward fulfilment of

a high ideal. Mr. Worthing was a native of Scotland, born at Edinburgh, October 12, 1866. He was educated at Hunter's School, in Edinburgh, at the Royal High School there, and at the Edinburgh University. It was intended that he should follow the profession of medicine, and for some time his studies took that direction, but as he found himself exceedingly sensitive to to those painful experiences which, in medical training, are unavoidable, he was eventually constrained to abandon that pursuit. In youth he joined an amateur theatrical club called the Edinburgh Dramatic Society, and his first appearance on the stage was made, during his membership of that club, for a benefit, in the farce of "Which Is Which?" When he adopted the stage as a profession he chose for himself the name of Frank Worthing, in order to avoid confusion of professional identity, his brother, Nicol Pentland, having