form of vice and evil.  In every human heart there gleams a bright reflection of this shining armor.  The stage has no lights or shadows that are not lights of life and shadows of the heart.  To each human consciousness it appeals in alternating mirth and sadness, and will not be denied.  Err it must, for it is human; but, being human, it must endure.  The love of acting is inherent in our nature.  Watch your children play, and you will see that almost their first conscious effort is to act and to imitate.  It is an instinct, and you can no more repress it than you can extinguish thought.  When this instinct of all is developed by cultivation in the few, it becomes a wonderful art, priceless to civilization in the solace it yields, the thought it generates, the refinement it inspires.  Some of its latest achievements are not unworthy of their grandest predecessors.  Some of its youngest devotees are at least as proud of its glories and as anxious to preserve them as any who have gone before.  Theirs is a glorious heritage!  You honor it.  They have a noble but a difficult, and sometimes a disheartening, task.  You encourage it.  And no word of kindly interest or criticism dropped in the public ear from friendly lips goes unregarded or is unfertile of good.  The universal study of Shakespeare in our public schools is a splendid sign of the departure of prejudice, and all criticism is welcome; but it is acting chiefly that can open to others, with any spark of Shakespeare’s mind, the means of illuminating the world.  Only the theatre can realize to us in a life-like way what Shakespeare was to his own time.  And it is, indeed, a noble destiny for the theatre to vindicate in these later days the greatness which sometimes it has seemed to vulgarize.  It has been too much the custom to talk of Shakespeare as nature’s child—­as the lad who held horses for people who came to the play—­as a sort of chance phenomenon who wrote these plays by accident and unrecognized.  How supremely ridiculous!  How utterly irreconcilable with the grand dimensions of the man!  How absurdly dishonoring to the great age of which he was, and was known to be, the glory!  The noblest literary man of all time—­the finest and yet most prolific writer—­the greatest student of man, and the greatest master of man’s highest gift of language—­surely it is treason to humanity to speak of such an one as in any sense a commonplace being!  Imagine him rather, as he must have been, the most notable courtier of the Court—­the most perfect gentleman who stood in the Elizabethan throng—­the man in whose presence divines would falter and hesitate lest their knowledge of the Book should seem poor by the side of his, and at whom even queenly royalty would look askance, with an oppressive sense that here was one to whose omnipotent and true imagination the hearts of kings and queens and peoples had always been an open page!  The thought of such a man is an incomparable inheritance for any nation, and such a man was the actor—­Shakespeare.