than in England; but on this very account the actors constituted a separate class, having little contact with society, receiving few recruits from without, regulated by fixed usages, and confined to a particular groove.  In England, on the contrary, the stage was an outlet for irregular talent, impatient of steady labor or severe restrictions, and captivated by the freedom and diversity of a career which, beginning in vagrancy, might lead at a single bound to a brilliant and enviable position.  Hence the biographies of English players, taken collectively, offer a vast store of amusing anecdotes, illustrative not only of the history of the stage, but of personal character and social manners.  Yet books of this kind; though read with avidity on their first appearance, have naturally fallen into neglect.  Like most other biographies, they are overloaded with details that have no abiding interest, and few readers of the present day are tempted to explore the mass for themselves.  It was, however, no very arduous task to sift out the more valuable relics and dispose them in proper order, and we can only wonder that Mr. Fitzgerald was not anticipated in the performance of it by some earlier collector.  Gait’s Lives of the Players and Dr. Doran’s History of the English Stage have left this particular field almost wholly unworked, and it is one for which Mr. Fitzgerald was well fitted, both by his previous labors and knowledge of the soil, and by his practiced dexterity in the use of the necessary implements.  He has accordingly produced a volume which may either be read consecutively or dipped into at random with the certainty of entertainment and without risk of tedium.  Among the sources from which his material is drawn he assigns the first place to the Memoirs of Tate Wilkinson and its sequel, The Wandering Patentee, and the summary which he gives, as far as possible in the narrator’s own language, presents a graphic picture of the provincial stage at a period when it formed a real nursery of talent for the metropolitan theatres, enriched with anecdotes of Foote and Garrick as lively and dramatic as any of the scenes in their own farces, and affording the strongest confirmation of their protege’s account of his unrivaled mimicry.  The story of George Anne Bellamy, and that of Mrs. Robinson, the “Perdita” of a somewhat later day, deal with the more familiar and less obsolete vicissitudes of betrayed beauty, while giving us glimpses of a social crust that has since been replaced by a more composite exterior.  A deeper and far more pathetic interest attaches to the brief career of Gerald Griffin, the author of The Collegians and Gisippus, who, had he lived in our day, would have been in danger of having his head turned by premature success, instead of being heart-sickened by long neglect and coarse rebuffs, and smothering his aspirations in a convent.  In striking contrast with this pale figure is the portly and imposing one of Robert William Elliston,