If an actor were to take to heart everything that is written and said about him, his life would be an intolerable burden.  And one piece of advice I should give to young actors is this:  Do not be too sensitive; receive praise or censure with modesty and patience.  Good honest criticism is, of course, most advantageous to an actor; but he should save himself from the indiscriminate reading of a multitude of comments, which may only confuse instead of stimulating.  And here let me say to young actors in all earnestness:  Beware of the loungers of our calling, the camp followers who hang on the skirts of the army, and who inveigle the young into habits that degrade their character, and paralyze their ambition.  Let your ambition be ever precious to you, and, next to your good name, the jewel of your souls.  I care nothing for the actor who is not always anxious to rise to the highest position in his particular walk; but this ideal cannot be cherished by the young man who is induced to fritter away his time and his mind in thoughtless company.

But in the midst of all this turmoil about the stage, one fact stands out clearly:  the dramatic art is steadily growing in credit with the educated classes.  It is drawing more recruits from those classes.  The enthusiasm for our calling has never reached a higher pitch.  There is quite an extraordinary number of ladies who want to become actresses, and the cardinal difficulty in the way is not the social deterioration which some people think they would incur, but simply their inability to act.  Men of education who become actors do not find that their education is useless.  If they have the necessary aptitude—­the inborn instinct for the stage—­all their mental training will be of great value to them.  It is true that there must always be grades in the theatre, that an educated man who is an indifferent actor can never expect to reach the front rank.  If he do no more than figure in the army at Bosworth Field, or look imposing in a doorway; if he never play any but the smallest parts; if in these respects he be no better than men who could not pass an examination in any branch of knowledge—­he has no more reason to complain than the highly-educated man who longs to write poetry, and possesses every qualification—­save the poetic faculty.  There are people who seem to think that only irresistible genius justifies any one in adopting the stage as a vocation.  They make it an argument against the profession that many enter it from a low sphere of life, without any particular fitness for acting, but simply to earn a livelihood by doing the subordinate and mechanical work which is necessary in every theatre.  And so men and women of refinement—­especially women—­are warned that they must do themselves injury by passing through the rank and file during their term of probation in the actors’ craft.  Now, I need not remind you that on the stage everybody cannot be great, any more than students of music can all become great musicians; but very many will do sound artistic work which is of great value.  As for any question of conduct, Heaven forbid that I should be dogmatic; but it does not seem to me logical that while genius is its own law in the pursuit of a noble art, all inferior merit or ambition is to be deterred from the same path by appalling pictures of its temptations.