As for individual actors, Mr. Mackinnon’s Prince Hal was a most gay and graceful performance, lit here and there with charming touches of princely dignity and of noble feeling.  Mr. Coleridge’s Falstaff was full of delightful humour, though perhaps at times he did not take us sufficiently into his confidence.  An audience looks at a tragedian, but a comedian looks at his audience.  However, he gave much pleasure to every one, and Mr. Bourchier’s Hotspur was really most remarkable.  Mr. Bourchier has a fine stage presence, a beautiful voice, and produces his effects by a method as dramatically impressive as it is artistically right.  Once or twice he seemed to me to spoil his last line by walking through it.  The part of Harry Percy is one full of climaxes which must not be let slip.  But still there was always a freedom and spirit in his style which was very pleasing, and his delivery of the colloquial passages I thought excellent, notably of that in the first act: 

      What d’ ye call the place? 
   A plague upon’t—­it is in Gloucestershire;
   ’Twas where the madcap duke his uncle kept,
   His uncle York;

lines by the way in which Kemble made a great effect.  Mr. Bourchier has the opportunity of a fine career on the English stage, and I hope he will take advantage of it.  Among the minor parts in the play Glendower, Mortimer and Sir Richard Vernon were capitally acted, Worcester was a performance of some subtlety, Mrs. Woods was a charming Lady Percy, and Lady Edward Spencer Churchill, as Mortimer’s wife, made us all believe that we understood Welsh.  Her dialogue and her song were most pleasing bits of artistic realism which fully accounted for the Celtic chair at Oxford.

But though I have mentioned particular actors, the real value of the whole representation was to be found in its absolute unity, in its delicate sense of proportion, and in that breadth of effect which is to be got only by the most careful elaboration of detail.  I have rarely seen a production better stage-managed.  Indeed, I hope that the University will take some official notice of this delightful work of art.  Why should not degrees be granted for good acting?  Are they not given to those who misunderstand Plato and who mistranslate Aristotle?  And should the artist be passed over?  No.  To Prince Hal, Hotspur and Falstaff, D.C.L.’s should be gracefully offered.  I feel sure they would be gracefully accepted.  To the rest of the company the crimson or the sheep-skin hood might be assigned honoris causa to the eternal confusion of the Philistine, and the rage of the industrious and the dull.  Thus would Oxford confer honour on herself, and the artist be placed in his proper position.  However, whether or not Convocation recognises the claims of culture, I hope that the Oxford Dramatic Society will produce every summer for us some noble play like Henry IV.  For, in plays of this kind, plays which deal with bygone times, there is always this peculiar