nd, and I take it that
this intuitive essayist, who is so alert to seize the few remaining
unappropriated ideas and analogies in the world, is one of them.

No doubt if the Plantagenets of this day were required to dress in a
suit of chain-armor and wear iron pots on their heads, they would be as
ridiculous as most tragedy actors on the stage. The pit which recognizes
Snooks in his tin breastplate and helmet laughs at him, and Snooks
himself feels like a sheep; and when the great tragedian comes
on, shining in mail, dragging a two-handed sword, and mouths the
grandiloquence which poets have put into the speech of heroes, the
dress-circle requires all its good-breeding and its feigned love of the
traditionary drama not to titter.

If this sort of acting, which is supposed to have come down to us from
the Elizabethan age, and which culminated in the school of the Keans,
Kembles, and Siddonses, ever had any fidelity to life, it must have
been in a society as artificial as the prose of Sir Philip Sidney. That
anybody ever believed in it is difficult to think, especially when we
read what privileges the fine beaux and gallants of the town took behind
the scenes and on the stage in the golden days of the drama. When a part
of the audience sat on the stage, and gentlemen lounged or reeled across
it in the midst of a play, to speak to acquaintances in the audience,
the illusion could not have been very strong.

Now and then a genius, like Rachel as Horatia, or Hackett as
Falstaff, may actually seem to be the character assumed by virtue of a
transforming imagination, but I suppose the fact to be that getting
into a costume, absurdly antiquated and remote from all the habits and
associations of the actor, largely accounts for the incongruity and
ridiculousness of most of our modern acting. Whether what is called the
"legitimate drama" ever was legitimate we do not know, but the advocates
of it appear to think that the theatre was some time cast in a
mould, once for all, and is good for all times and peoples, like the
propositions of Euclid. To our eyes the legitimate drama of to-day is
the one in which the day is reflected, both in costume and speech, and
which touches the affections, the passions, the humor, of the present
time. The brilliant success of the few good plays that have been written
out of the rich life which we now live--the most varied, fruitful, and
dramatically suggestive--ought to rid us forever of the buskin-