quickly, when he played Richard, than in America, which was his home. In Boston his presentment of it was chilled with an immediate frost, and when, in November, 1889, he had acted in Philadelphia, he wrote to me, "The Philadelphians are very indifferent and don't care a damn about this fine presentment of Shakespeare's tragedy."

William Gillette and his American company, acting in "Secret Service" and in "Sherlock Holmes," were very warmly received in London; Miss Grace George made "a palpable hit" there, acting in "Divorçons"; and if Mr. Sothern and Miss Marlowe did not win an opulent success, it was only because their venture was cruelly mismanaged. Miss Marlowe is one of the loveliest of romantic actors, and, within her proper field, the peer of any woman now in professional life. Mr. Sothern is an exceptionally good comedian and an accomplished "all round" actor,-a good Hamlet, an admirable Benedick, and, with one exception, Henry Irving, the best Malvolio that has been seen within half a century. Those actors should have won golden reward in England, and they would have done so if their advent had not been clouded by such advertising as is serviceable only to a three-ring circus or a new brand of pickles. By some competent judges who saw them their acting was warmly extolled, but their London engagement was short, and they did not have sufficient time in which to overcome the aversion which a coarse

and singularly inappropriate style of proclamation had inspired.

The failure of American actors on the British Stage, when they do fail there, is, almost invariably, attributable to one final, decisive, and sufficient cause,—namely, inadequate acting in an unattractive play. It should always be borne in mind, by aspirants who seek for laurel and lucre in foreign lands, that old communities, with centuries of production in all the arts behind them, possess established traditions which they do not lightly discard, and that, having seen more than can have been seen by communities of modern origin, they are less easily aroused, less prone to emotion, and far less ready to be surprised into pleasure or to express gratification. There is, in particular, a kind of inertia of reticence in the intellectual class of an English audience; the actor is expected to prove his case: but when he does prove it, as many American actors have done, he finds himself taken to the English heart,-"not with vain thanks, but with acceptance bounteous," and when once he is so taken he is kept there.

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III.

THE THEATRE AND THE PULPIT.

THE old intolerance toward the Stage has, of late years, somewhat abated: indeed, ever since the time when the Rev. Dr. Bellows, standing in his pulpit, spoke so eloquently and fervently in defence of the dramatic profession an influence has been slowly operant in the religious community favorable to a just and kindly view of the Theatre: yet the spirit of bigotry has not been extinguished. It still, from time to time, makes itself manifest in denunciatory sermons, and actors are still occasionally made to feel that they are regarded, by a considerable number of persons, as the followers of a disreputable profession.

The proposition is incontestable that Society is, to a large extent, corrupt, and that the spirit of our age is materialistic, sensual, and pagan. Censors of the social order have good ground for their censure, and those of them who, when rebuking the evil forces and deploring the wrong proclivities of the day, include a perverted Theatre in their condemnation are entirely justified by the facts which they perceive and declare. On the other hand, censors who assail the Theatre as an

institution and the Dramatic Profession as a class, alleging that the Stage is intrinsically injurious and its professors necessarily immoral, assume a position untenable in the light of truth and wantonly, flagrantly, insolently unjust. There are persons, however, who assume that position and habitually make those slanderous charges, and many among them are members of the "Christian" Clergy, ministers of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, who, considering their profession, might reasonably be expected to abhor the crime of bearing false witness against their fellow creatures. It has pleased certain persons of that class, including selfrighteous clergymen, to select articles in the press written by me, condemnatory of the misuse of the Theatre by bad men, and use them as a justification for citing and quoting me as an enemy to the Stage and to the Actor. That is a wicked injustice. The following letter, which I wrote in consequence of that gross misrepresentation, contains an explicit statement of my views on the subject, and I reproduce it here, as an act of justice to myself, from "The New York Tribune" of March 15, 1907:

"To the Editor of "The Tribune':

"Sir: I learn from an editorial comment in "The New York Dramatic Mirror'-the leading dramatic paper of our country, and, therefore, an authority to be trusted-that the Rev. Mr. Snowden, a clergyman of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, has been misquoting and misusing words of mine as a support and justifica

tion of an attack that he is making upon the Theatre as an institution, and that he cites me as an enemy of the Stage.

"I do not know what words of mine have been quoted by that ecclesiastic, or in what way they have been distorted and misapplied. I do know, and I wish explicitly to say, that any representation of me as an enemy or opponent of the Theatre, or as anything other than a believer in it and a devoted friend of it, is an impudent calumny. Against abuses of the Theatre by unworthy persons who, from time to time, have obtained control of it I have always contended. The institution itself has always received from me all the support that I could possibly give.

""The Mirror,'-with a mild forbearance that does not supply the requisite energy of repudiation of this pulpit libel,relates that 'for nearly half a century' I have been writing about the Theatre and have 'published many books embodying graceful tributes to it and to its people.' The whole truth is that I have been, professionally, and in continuous, active employment, a writer about the Theatre for more than fifty years; that I am the oldest dramatic reviewer, in this country, in continuous service of the press as such; that I have been the Dramatic Editor and Critic of "The New York Tribune' for forty-two years, come July 13, 1907; that I have passed the whole of my life in intimate relations with the Theatre and in laborious support of it; that I have used my utmost ability and industry to sustain and advance it, and that now, at more than three-score-and-ten, I am still its earnest advocate and still in devoted service of it. My writings about the Drama already fill more than fifty huge folio volumes. And, although I have strenuously opposed and attacked every misuse of the Theatre that I have observed, the sum total of my testimony is wholly and fervently in favor of the Theatre and the Dramatic Profession.

"No man could give ampler or more practical proof than I have given of devotion to the Stage. My wife was, in her youth, an actress of distinction, professionally associated with the dramatic companies of Edwin Booth, James H. Hackett, John