But the contemporary English-speaking stage furnishes examples just as striking of the influence of the actor on the dramatist.  Sir Arthur Wing Pinero’s greatest heroine, Paula Tanqueray, wore from her inception the physical aspect of Mrs. Patrick Campbell.  Many of the most effective dramas of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones have been built around the personality of Sir Charles Wyndham.  The Wyndham part in Mr. Jones’s plays is always a gentleman of the world, who understands life because he has lived it, and is “wise with the quiet memory of old pain.”  He is moral because he knows the futility of immorality.  He is lonely, lovable, dignified, reliable, and sound.  By serene and unobtrusive understanding he straightens out the difficulties in which the other people of the play have wilfully become entangled.  He shows them the error of their follies, preaches a worldly-wise little sermon to each one, and sends them back to their true places in life, sadder and wiser men and women.  In order to give Sir Charles Wyndham an opportunity to display all phases of his experienced gentility in such a character as this, Mr. Jones has repeated the part in drama after drama.  Many of the greatest characters of the theatre have been so essentially imbued with the physical and mental personality of the actors who created them that they have died with their performers and been lost forever after from the world of art.  In this regard we think at once of Rip Van Winkle.  The little play that Mr. Jefferson, with the aid of Dion Boucicault, fashioned out of Washington Irving’s story is scarcely worth the reading; and if, a hundred years from now, any student of the drama happens to look it over, he may wonder in vain why it was so beloved, for many, many years, by all America; and there will come no answer, since the actor’s art will then be only a tale that is told.  So Beau Brummel died with Mr. Mansfield; and if our children, who never saw his superb performance, chance in future years to read the lines of Mr. Fitch’s play, they will hardly believe us when we tell them that the character of Brummel once was great.  With such current instances before us, it ought not to be so difficult as many university professors find it to understand the vogue of certain plays of the Elizabethan and Restoration eras which seem to us now, in the reading, lifeless things.  When we study the mad dramas of Nat Lee, we should remember Betterton; and properly to appreciate Thomas Otway, we must imagine the aspect and the voice of Elizabeth Barry.

It may truthfully be said that Mrs. Barry created Otway, both as dramatist and poet; for The Orphan and Venice Preserved, the two most pathetic plays in English, would never have been written but for her.  It is often thus within the power of an actor to create a dramatist; and his surest means of immortality is to inspire the composition of plays which may survive his own demise.  After Duse is dead, poets may read La Citta Morta, and