According to Carlyle, the only biographies in the English language worth reading—­of course with implied exceptions—­are the lives of players.  Over English biographers in general there hangs, as he says, a “Damocles’ sword of Respectability,” forbidding revelations that might either offend somebody’s sensibilities or exhibit the subject in any other than a dignified attitude and sober light, and, as a consequence, compelling the suppression of details which were needed to render the portraiture characteristic and lifelike.  Actors being as a class outside the pale of “respectability,” no such sacrifice is demanded in their case; and whereas in their lifetime they assume many characters, and though constantly before the public are known to it only in disguised forms and borrowed attributes, after death their personality is laid bare, and they are made to contribute once more to the entertainment of the world by a last appearance in which nothing is unreal and nothing dissembled or concealed.  This, of course, applies far better to a former period than to the present, as does also the explanation of the same fact offered by Mr. Fitzgerald—­namely, the romantic interest attaching to the stage and exciting curiosity in regard to those wonderful beings who appear before us as embodiments of passion and poetry, humor and whimsicality, transporting us into an ideal world, and leaving us, when they vanish, in a prosaic one to which they do not seem to belong.  Illusions of this kind are scarcely retained by even the young—­perhaps, indeed, least of all by the young—­of our generation.  Moreover, the changes which society has undergone during the last half century have rubbed out much that was distinctive in the actor’s life, and have given to manners and habits in general a uniformity that leaves little that is striking and piquant to describe.  The adventures and the eccentricities of actors and actresses of a bygone time were paralleled or exceeded by those of other classes.  At present such sources of interest are rare in any class, and we are obliged to have recourse to sensational novels or the records of crime.

Future biographers are no more likely to have such a subject as Samuel Johnson than such a one as George Frederick Cooke; while both Boswell and Dunlap, had they written in our day, would probably have been much more reticent and much less amusing.  We cannot therefore agree with Mr. Fitzgerald in thinking that the colorless character of the few theatrical biographies that have appeared in recent times is to be ascribed to the decay of the art of acting and the lack of an ideal involving a long and arduous struggle in the attainment of eminence.  In France, as he justly observes, the history of the profession has never possessed the same adventurous interest, the lives of French actors showing in general a mere record of steady and regular progression, such as is found in other professions.  The stage in France, as in all Catholic countries, lay under a heavier ban