As regards the acting, the two things the Greeks valued most in actors were grace of gesture and music of voice.  Indeed, to gain these virtues their actors used to subject themselves to a regular course of gymnastics and a particular regime of diet, health being to the Greeks not merely a quality of art, but a condition of its production.  Whether or not our English actors hold the same view may be doubted; but Mr. Vezin certainly has always recognised the importance of a physical as well as of an intellectual training for the stage, and his performance of King Priam was distinguished by stately dignity and most musical enunciation.  With Mr. Vezin, grace of gesture is an unconscious result—­not a conscious effort.  It has become nature, because it was once art.  Mr. Beerbohm Tree also is deserving of very high praise for his Paris.  Ease and elegance characterised every movement he made, and his voice was extremely effective.  Mr. Tree is the perfect Proteus of actors.  He can wear the dress of any century and the appearance of any age, and has a marvellous capacity of absorbing his personality into the character he is creating.  To have method without mannerism is given only to a few, but among the few is Mr. Tree.  Miss Alma Murray does not possess the physique requisite for our conception of Helen, but the beauty of her movements and the extremely sympathetic quality of her voice gave an indefinable charm to her performance.  Mrs. Jopling looked like a poem from the Pantheon, and indeed the personae mutae were not the least effective figures in the play.  Hecuba was hardly a success.  In acting, the impression of sincerity is conveyed by tone, not by mere volume of voice, and whatever influence emotion has on utterance it is certainly not in the direction of false emphasis.  Mrs. Beerbohm Tree’s OEnone was much better, and had some fine moments of passion; but the harsh realistic shriek with which the nymph flung herself from the battlements, however effective it might have been in a comedy of Sardou, or in one of Mr. Burnand’s farces, was quite out of place in the representation of a Greek tragedy.  The classical drama is an imaginative, poetic art, which requires the grand style for its interpretation, and produces its effects by the most ideal means.  It is in the operas of Wagner, not in popular melodrama, that any approximation to the Greek method can be found.  Better to wear mask and buskin than to mar by any modernity of expression the calm majesty of Melpomene.

As an artistic whole, however, the performance was undoubtedly a great success.  It has been much praised for its archaeology, but Mr. Godwin is something more than a mere antiquarian.  He takes the facts of archaeology, but he converts them into artistic and dramatic effects, and the historical accuracy that underlies the visible shapes of beauty that he presents to us, is not by any means the distinguishing quality of the complete work of art.  This quality