Betterton, where, says Cibber, "the players were most of them too advanced in years to mend -Betterton himself was seventy-the other was at Drury Lane, under Rich; and here the actors, Cibber himself among them, he described as "too young to be excellent." But the younger company was the more successful of the two, and all would have gone well with them but for the impossible character of their manager, Christopher Rich. Originally a lawyer, he was one of those persons who enter into theatrical business with the sole purpose of getting as much money as they can out of it, regardless of the claims of art or the feelings of their artists. To this excusable insensibility Rich added positive dishonesty. His ambition as a manager was to cheat his actors out of as much of their legitimate gains as he could; and as a lawyer he was able to do this with some skill. At length, however, his misconduct led to a revolt, and after considerable negotiation, Drury Lane came for the first time under the management of three actors-Cibber, Wilks, and Doggett. Now, for the first time for many years, the theatre was properly and honestly administered. The credit of this is due chiefly to Cibber himself. Wilks, an accomplished actor, cared for nothing so long as he had good parts and plenty of them; Doggett retired from the partnership early in its history, and was succeeded by Barton Booth, the tragedian and original representative of Addison's Cato, an amiable, indulgent, and easy-going gentleman. Cibber was quite equal to the task imposed on him. His natural gaiety of disposition, his impudent self-confidence, his shrewdness, his sensible appreciation of facts, which his ingenuous vanity never impaired, well fitted him for the task of smoothing down difficult colleagues, facing reverses, overcoming hostility, and making money. With justifiable pride he declared that, during his management, bills were paid regularly, that no actor ever required a written agreement, and that the work of the theatre was carried on with order

and propriety. The much-tried actor-manager comes in for a great deal of unsympathetic criticism; by some he is even represented as the great bane of theatrical art in this country. But history shows us conclusively that, so far, it is to the actor-manager we owe all the most worthy achievement of our theatre, the preservation from decay and disorder of all that is highest in theatrical art. To Cibber, Garrick, and John Kemble, as actor-managers, is due the credit of rescuing the theatres of the eighteenth century from the dishonesty or incompetence or extravagance of such worthless managers as Rich, or Fleetwood, or Sheridan. Cibber says truly of his own record—and it applies to those of his immediate successors- "our being actors ourselves was an advantage to our government, which all former managers who were only idle gentlemen wanted." In the absence of a State theatre, it has fallen to the task of individual actors to do what they can to uphold the finer traditions of our stage and history proves to us that, in face of difficulties that time has increased rather than diminished, these actors have not failed in their duty. Whether it has brought them profit or loss, prosperity or ruin, they have successively devoted themselves to an enterprise which, in almost every other country but our own, has been deemed not unworthy of the assistance of the State. If, as some tell us, we are to see in the future a great extension of State control in our domestic concerns, it will be interesting to see if that extension spreads as far as the theatre.

Cibber sums up very fairly the history of his own management. "Though," he says, "our best merit as actors was never equal to that of our predecessors, yet I will venture to say that in all its branches the stage had never been under so just, so prosperous, and so settled a regulation for forty years before." It is true that in Cibber's time no actor of genius appeared who could challenge, to those who remembered him, the supreme

excellence of Betterton. Though the best part of his career belongs to the seventeenth century, Betterton was still playing Hamlet in 1709 at the advanced age of seventy-four, and playing it with a successful assumption of youth that extorted the admiration of Steele. Cibber does his best to give posterity some notion of the extraordinary powers of this great actor, and, as far as such a thing is possible, he is not altogether unsuccessful. Though Betterton's voice was manly rather than sweet, his figure short and inclining to corpulence, his limbs athletic rather than delicate, yet with these disadvantages he had that personality, that something indefinable in bearing and countenance, which, from the moment of his appearance on the stage, seemed to seize and rivet the attention of the audience, the eyes and ears of even the giddy and the inadvertent. Betterton must have had just that quality of personal magnetism-there seems no better word by which to describe this peculiar attribute-which is as essential to the great actor as it is to the great orator, the great statesman, the great soldier, which is, indeed, a part of what men call greatness. //As an actual instance of the method of Betterton's art, Cibber describes for us his treatment of the scene in Hamlet, in which the Prince first sees his father's spirit. It was the custom, he says, of most actors, on seeing the ghost, to throw themselves into a strained and violent tone of voice expressive of rage and fury, and bring down thunders of applause by the force of their declamation./ Betterton was the first to give to the scene its real significance; it was with mute amazement he first looked on his dear father's spirit, and then in a solemn, trembling voice, which made the ghost as terrible to the spectator as to himself, with awe and reverence, from which all thought of violence or defiance was banished, he addressed the spirit. One writer avers that in this scene Betterton's countenance, which was naturally ruddy and sanguine, turned as white as his neckcloth in the stress of

his emotion. If this be true, he was not only a great, but peculiarly gifted, actor. But the whole description is perhaps a little highly coloured, for the same author says that at the sight of Betterton's horror and distress the blood of the audience seemed to shudder in their veins. More convincing than such criticism as this, is the testimony of Barton Booth, the tragedian, who succeeded Betterton in "many of his characters." "When I acted

the ghost with Betterton," said Booth, "instead of my aweing him, he terrified me, But divinity hung round that man!" Truly there must have been about Betterton a grandeur, a nobility of soul, that on the stage and in private life alike compelled the love and veneration of the men who knew him. It was this love and respect that took Steele to Westminster Abbey to see the last office done to one whom, he wrote in The Tatler" I have always very much admired, and from whose action I had received more strong expressions of what is great and noble in human nature than from the arguments of the most solid philosophers, or the descriptions of the most charming poets I have ever read." A greater, a finer tribute was never paid to an actor If the eighteenth century produced in Garrick Betterton's equal as a player, perhaps his superior in some respects, Garrick never held in men's hearts the place that Betterton held in the love and esteem of his contemporaries.

History repeats itself in the theatre as elsewhere. The treatment of this very scene with his father's ghost which made Betterton's Hamlet something of a revelation in his day, is the same that impressed a German critic who witnessed the Hamlet of David Garrick, and made Fielding put into the mouth of Partridge in Tom Jones the famous criticism of Garrick's deportment in this scene. The secret of all

these striking and immediate successes by which in the past actors have suddenly leapt into fame has at all times been a return to nature in the presentment of some

character, a revolt against the staginess and unreality of a hide-bound convention, a treatment of a character or a scene that, instead of calling down the customary applause which an experienced actor can always provoke by tricks of declamation, quite regardless of good sense, produces rather that mute astonishment in an audience which is more eloquent to the artist than the clapping of hands. And just as Garrick in Richard III. and Hamlet, by a return to nature brought back on to the stage the true spirit and genius of acting which had died for a time with Betterton, so did Edmund Kean repeat, more than seventy years after, the striking success which, in 1741, Charles Macklin had made in the character of Shylock by playing the Jew for the first time as a real and serious human being. Kean was a genius and Macklin was not; Kean leapt into a fame which did not depend only on his conception of Shylock; Macklin made no deep impression in any other Shakespearean character. But both these actors were courageous enough to depart from tradition in their reading of this particular part, to face at rehearsal nothing but discouragement, ridicule, or contempt from their fellow-actors, and were sufficiently gifted, sufficiently masters of their art, to convince audiences accustomed to laugh at the grotesque and comic Jew of stage convention that Shylock, whatever the unreality, the fancifulness of the fable of the play, was a living, breathing embodiment of a type conceived and executed by the dramatist in all seriousness and earnestness.

II

ROBERT WILKS, Barton Booth, and Mrs. Oldfield are the principal figures in stage history during Cibber's time, and, if not three of the greatest, they are three of the most amiable and distinguished persons who have ever adopted the calling of a player. Many are apt to think that the