theatrical. The river and its tiny craft, the little gabled houses of the neighbourhood, with a garden or two dropped in, tell delightfully in the general effect. They are worthy to rank with Cruikshank's illustrations of Jack Sheppard and The Tower of London, as mementoes of the little old smokeless London before the century of Johnson, though that, too, as Dr. Doran bears witness, knew what fogs could be. Then there is the Fortune Theatre near Cripplegate, and, most charming of all, two views—street and river fronts—the Duke's Theatre, Dorset Garden, in Fleet Street, designed by Wren, decorated by Gibbons—graceful, naïve, dainty, like the work of a very refined Palladio, working minutely, perhaps more delicately than at Vicenza, in the already crowded city on the Thames side.

[77] The portraits of actors and other theatrical celebrities range from Elizabeth, from the melodramatic costumes and faces of the contemporaries of Shakespeare, to the conventional costumes, the rotund expression, of the age of the Georges, masking a power of imaginative impersonation probably unknown in Shakespeare's day. Edward Burbage, like Shakespeare's own portrait, is, we venture to think, a trifle stolid. Field—Nathaniel Field, author of The Fatal Dowry, and an actor of reputation—in his singular costume, and with a face of perhaps not quite reassuring subtlety, might pass for the original of those Italian, or Italianized, voluptuaries in sin which pleased the fancy of Shakespeare's age. Mixed up with many striking, thoroughly dramatic physiognomies, it must be confessed that some of these portraits scarcely help at all to explain the power of the players to whom they belonged. That, perhaps, is what we might naturally expect; the more, in proportion as the dramatic art is a matter in which many very subtle and indirect channels to men's sympathy are called into play. Edward Alleyn, from the portrait preserved at [78] his noble foundation at Dulwich, like a fine Holbein, figures, in blent strength and delicacy, as a genial, or perhaps jovial, soul, finding time for sentiment,—Prynne (included, we suppose, in this company, like the skull at the feast) as a likable if somewhat melancholic young man; while Garrick and his wife playing cards, after Zoffany, present a pair of just very nice young people. On the other hand, the tail-pieces, chiefly devoted to Garrick, prove what a wonderful natural variety there was in Garrick's soul, and are well worth comparative study. Noticeable again, among the whole-plate portraits, is the thoroughly reassuring countenance of Steele, the singularly fine heads of John, Charles, and Fanny Kemble, while the certainly plain, pinched countenance of William Davenant reminds one of Charles Kean, and might well have lighted up, as did his, when the soul came into it, into power and charm, as the speaking eyes assure us even in its repose.