Old John Downes, who was prompter at the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields from 1662 to 1706, and whose “Roscius Anglicanus” is a most valuable history of the stage of the Restoration, describes an actor named Johnson as being especially “skilful in the art of painting, which is a great adjument very promovent to the art of elocution.”  Mr. Waldron, who, in 1789, produced a new edition of the “Roscius Anglicanus,” with notes by Tom Davies, the biographer of Garrick, decides that Downes’s mention of the “art of painting” has reference to the art of “painting the face and marking it with dark lines to imitate the wrinkles of old age.”  This, Waldron continues, “was formerly carried to excess on the stage, though now a good deal disused.  I have seen actors, who were really older than the characters they were to represent, mark their faces with black lines of Indian ink to such a degree that they appeared as if looking through a mask of wire.”  And Mr. Waldron finds occasion to add that “Mr. Garrick’s skill in the necessary preparation of his face for the aged and venerable Lear, and for Lusignan, was as remarkable as his performance of those characters was admirable.”

In 1741 was published “An Historical and Critical Account of the Theatres in Europe,” a translation of a work by “the famous Lewis Riccoboni, of the Italian Theatre at Paris.”  The author had visited England in 1727, apparently, when he had conversed with the great Mr. Congreve, finding in him “taste joined with great learning,” and studied with some particularity the condition of the English stage.  “As to the actors,” he writes, “if, after forty-five years’ experience I may be entitled to give my opinion, I dare advance that the best actors in Italy and France come far short of those in England.”  And he devotes some space to a description of a performance he witnessed at the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, dwelling especially upon the skill of an actor who personated an old man.  “He who acted the old man executed it to the nicest perfection which one could expect in no player who had not forty years’ experience....  I made no manner of doubt of his being an old comedian, who, instructed by long experience, and, at the same time, assisted by the weight of years, had performed it so naturally.  But how great was my surprise when I learned that he was a young man of about twenty-six!  I could not believe it; but I owned that it might be possible had he only used a trembling and broken voice, and had only an extreme weakness possessed his body, because I conceived it possible for a young actor, by the help of art, to imitate that debility of nature to such a pitch of exactness; but the wrinkles of his face, his sunken eyes, and his loose and yellow cheeks, the most certain marks of a great old age, were incontestable proofs against what they said to me.  Notwithstanding all this I was forced to submit to truth, because I know for certain that the actor, to fit himself for