that there are not persons who need as severe training before they attempt to personate nature in art as the painter must undergo who attempts to transfer its features to his canvas.  But the taste of the age must be taken into account.  The public does not demand that an actor shall come in at a private door and climb a steep staircase to get to the stage.  When a Star from the Private Theatricals descends upon the boards, with the arms of Venus and the throat of Juno, and a wardrobe got out of Paris and through our stingy Custom-house in forty trunks, the plodding actor, who has depended upon art, finds out, what he has been all the time telling us, that all the world’s a stage, and men and women merely players.  Art is good in its way; but what about a perfect figure? and is not dressing an art?  Can training give one an elegant form, and study command the services of a man milliner?  The stage is broadened out and re-enforced by a new element.  What went ye out for to see?

A person clad in fine raiment, to be sure.  Some of the critics may growl a little, and hint at the invasion of art by fashionable life, but the editor, whose motto is that the newspaper is made for man, not man for the newspaper, understands what is required in this inspiring histrionic movement, and when a lovely woman condescends to step from the drawing-room to the stage he confines his descriptions to her person, and does not bother about her capacity; and instead of wearying us with a list of her plays and performances, he gives us a column about her dresses in beautiful language that shows us how closely allied poetry is to tailoring.  Can the lady act?  Why, simpleminded, she has nearly a hundred frocks, each one a dream, a conception of genius, a vaporous idea, one might say, which will reveal more beauty than it hides, and teach the spectator that art is simply nature adorned.  Rachel in all her glory was not adorned like one of these.  We have changed all that.  The actress used to have a rehearsal.  She now has an “opening.”  Does it require nowadays, then, no special talent or gift to go on the stage?  No more, we can assure our readers, than it does to write a book.  But homely people and poor people can write books.  As yet they cannot act.

ALTRUISM

Christmas is supposed to be an altruistic festival.  Then, if ever, we allow ourselves to go out to others in sympathy expressed by gifts and good wishes.  Then self-forgetfulness in the happiness of others becomes a temporary fashion.  And we find—­do we not?—­the indulgence of the feeling so remunerative that we wish there were other days set apart to it.  We can even understand those people who get a private satisfaction in being good on other days besides Sunday.  There is a common notion that this Christmas altruistic sentiment is particularly shown towards the unfortunate and the dependent by those more prosperous, and in what is called a better