endings and rhyming tags, but may also be suggested by the art of acting itself.  The author of Obiter Dicta seeks to deny to actors all critical insight and all literary appreciation.  The actor, he tells us, is art’s slave, not her child, and lives entirely outside literature, ’with its words for ever on his lips, and none of its truths engraven on his heart.’  But this seems to me to be a harsh and reckless generalisation.  Indeed, so far from agreeing with it, I would be inclined to say that the mere artistic process of acting, the translation of literature back again into life, and the presentation of thought under the conditions of action, is in itself a critical method of a very high order; nor do I think that a study of the careers of our great English actors will really sustain the charge of want of literary appreciation.  It may be true that actors pass too quickly away from the form, in order to get at the feeling that gives the form beauty and colour, and that, where the literary critic studies the language, the actor looks simply for the life; and yet, how well the great actors have appreciated that marvellous music of words which in Shakespeare, at any rate, is so vital an element of poetic power, if, indeed, it be not equally so in the case of all who have any claim to be regarded as true poets.  ‘The sensual life of verse,’ says Keats, in a dramatic criticism published in the Champion, ’springs warm from the lips of Kean, and to one learned in Shakespearian hieroglyphics, learned in the spiritual portion of those lines to which Kean adds a sensual grandeur, his tongue must seem to have robbed the Hybla bees and left them honeyless.’  This particular feeling, of which Keats speaks, is familiar to all who have heard Salvini, Sarah Bernhardt, Ristori, or any of the great artists of our day, and it is a feeling that one cannot, I think, gain merely by reading the passage to oneself.  For my own part, I must confess that it was not until I heard Sarah Bernhardt in Phedre that I absolutely realised the sweetness of the music of Racine.  As for Mr. Birrell’s statement that actors have the words of literature for ever on their lips, but none of its truths engraved on their hearts, all that one can say is that, if it be true, it is a defect which actors share with the majority of literary critics.

The account Madame Ristori gives of her own struggles, voyages and adventures, is very pleasant reading indeed.  The child of poor actors, she made her first appearance when she was three months old, being brought on in a hamper as a New Year’s gift to a selfish old gentleman who would not forgive his daughter for having married for love.  As, however, she began to cry long before the hamper was opened, the comedy became a farce, to the immense amusement of the public.  She next appeared in a mediaeval melodrama, being then three years of age, and was so terrified at the machinations of the villain that she ran away at the