saw the fag-end of them, for to-day they prove themselves to be reasonable and generous beings.

But, as I say, I was set down as "stage struck," and I had to grow accustomed to the shoulder-shrug greeting of relatives, and the admonition that my first duty was to consider my father and mother. Never was anything so unfair. I was not in the ordinary sense of the word "stage struck." I was not fool enough to think that I could shine either as tragedian or comedian. I knew that a more prosaic life had been planned out for me, and I was prepared to enter into it; but, for a lurking fear that I should "take to the stage" (neither I nor my parents, nor my uncles and aunts, knew how this was to be done), I found myself compelled to read my beloved play-books and chronicles of great actors in private. When it was accidentally discovered that I had attempted to write a play there was real family trouble, and I am afraid that some of those who pretended to take interest in me wrote me down as "no good."

No! It never could be understood that I really wanted to make a study of an art that appealed to me more strongly than its sisters, music and painting. Yet the three are so closely allied that in devotedly following my first love I learnt to appreciate her kith and kin. I pen these lines because I am certain that many others must have felt as I did, and do; and, while doing justice to other claims upon their life energies, have taken their keenest delight in the story of the stage.

Yes; I am sure that to many of us the theatre has formed a little world of its own—a little world that we can enjoy and grasp—while the great world outside it is so apt to torture us with its perplexities, and half kill us with its seeming cruelties.

And I think that the little world in which I and my brother enthusiasts delight is all the more appreciated when we understand that it, too, is beset with its anxieties and grievous disappointments, and is far from the dazzling, soul-soothing elysium we pictured in the halcyon days of our boyhood. Our hearts go out all the more freely to the actors and actresses who warm them when we realise that they, too, have their trials as well as their triumphs. Our admiration is redoubled when it is leavened with sympathy. It is all the more important, then, that our entertainers should know that this feeling exists among those for whom they devote the work of their lives.

The artistic temperament is always more or less self-tormenting, and it is to be feared that my "little world," which shines so brightly over our great one, where sorrow has daily to be met and borne, is in itself a sorely troubled one.

In that strange French play which has our great English tragedian, Edmund Kean, for its central figure, Alexandre Dumas, who knew everything that could be known about the theatre, caused his actor-hero to respond bitterly to the woman who loved him, and who opined that all his troubles must vanish when he reflects that he is recognised as the King of the Stage. "King! Yes, three times a week! King with a tinselled sceptre, paste diamonds, and a pinchbeck crown. I rule a kingdom of thirty-five feet, and subjects who are jealous of my power." Then, when she asks, "Why do you not give it up?" he replies with indignation, "Give up the stage? Ah! you don't realise that he who has once donned the robe of Nessus cannot take it off without lacerating his flesh. I give up the stage?—renounce its excitement?—its glitter?—its triumphs? I give up my throne to another? Never! while I've health and strength to walk the boards, and brains to interpret the poetry I love. Remember, an actor cannot leave his work behind him. He lives only in his own lifetime—his memory fades with the generation to which he belongs, he must finish as he has begun, die as he has lived—die, if fortune favours him, with the delicious sound of applause in his ears. But those who have not set foot upon a dangerous path do well to avoid it."

The actor's complaint that his fame, however great, cannot be recollected many years beyond the time in which he lived is a very old one, and it must have been with this mournful view in his mind that David Garrick wrote:—

The volumes of theatrical history and biography that have been written and become popular since Garrick's day, prove that this is not wholly true, that we are not ungrateful to those who have instructed and amused us on the stage, and that we shall not willingly let their honoured memories die. The fact that the depressing feeling that they and their work will "soon be forgotten" still exists among members of the theatrical profession is, I venture to believe, some excuse for records such as this being issued during the lifetime of the artist, while memory is green, and appreciation can be written at first hand. Even if such works give little or no pleasure to their living subjects, it may be borne in mind that they will probably be of service to those future stage historians who will permanently inscribe their names on the tablets of fame.

The passionate declaration of Dumas's Kean that, despite his troubles and torments, he would never while life was in him leave the stage, is an old tale. Actors, as a rule, love to die in harness, and it was in the full knowledge of this that T. W. Robertson caused his stage David Garrick to reply to Alderman Ingot, when he offered to double or treble his income if he would abandon his profession, "Leave the stage? Impossible!" Poor Sothern, who created the part, was staying with me when his physician wrote saying that if he wished to prolong his life he must give up all work. After a moment's depression the actor with a sudden impulse snatched a portrait of himself as Garrick from my wall, tore it from its frame, and in a large, firm hand, wrote beneath it: "Leave the stage? Impossible!"

I have no doubt that Charles Wyndham, who, after Sothern's death, took up the part, and made it one of the greatest successes of the modern stage, feels the full import of the words every time he speaks them.

And if the actors suffer so do the dramatists, or at all events the would-be dramatists. In an admirable little book called "Play Writing," the author gives sound advice to the ever-growing, ever-complaining army of the unacted.

"Dramatic authorship," he says, "is to the profession of literature as reversing is to waltzing—an agony within a misery. A man who means to be a dramatist must be prepared for a life of never-ending strife and fret—a brain and heart-exhausting struggle from the hour when, full of hope, he starts off with his first farce in his pocket to the days when, involuntarily taking the advice of one of the early masters of his own craft—to wit, old rare Ben Jonson—he leaves 'the loathed stage and the more loathsome age.'"

And again, this anonymous but evidently experienced writer (I quote from him freely) declares that any dramatist could tales unfold of disappointments and delays, of hopes deferred, of chances dashed from the grasp at the very moment they seemed clutched, of weary waitings rewarded by failure, of enterprise and effort leading only to defeat, of hard work winning only loss. It has been suggested, too, in this connection, that any one sufficiently interested in such matters should make a