Among English-speaking actors he is the foremost living
representative of the art of eccentric comedy. He has not, of late
years, played a wide range of parts, but, restricting himself to a few
characters, and those of a representative kind, the manner in which he
has acted them is a perfect manner--and it is this that has gained for
him his distinctive eminence. Jefferson, however, is not simply and
exclusively an actor. His mind is many sided. He has painted landscape
pictures of a high order of merit,--pictures in which elusive moods and
subtle sentiments of nature are grasped with imaginative insight and
denoted and interpreted with a free, delicate, and luminous touch. He
has also addressed the public as an author. He has written an easy,
colloquial account of his own life, and that breezy, off-hand,
expeditious work,--after passing it as a serial through their Century
Magazine,--the Century Company has published in a beautiful volume. It
is a work that, for the sake of the writer, will be welcomed everywhere,
and, for its own sake as well as his, will everywhere be preserved.

Beginning a theatrical career nearly sixty years ago (1833), roving up
and down the earth ever since, and seldom continuing in one place,
Jefferson has had uncommon opportunities of noting the development of
the United States and of observing, in both hemispheres, the changeful
aspect of one of the most eventful periods in the history of the world.
Actors, as a class, know nothing but the stage and see nothing but the
pursuit in which they are occupied. Whoever has lived much among them
knows that fact, from personal observation. Whoever has read the various
and numerous memoirs that have from time to time been published by
elderly members of that profession must have been amused to perceive
that, while they conventionally agree that "all the world's a stage,"
they are enthusiastically convinced that the stage is all the world.
Jefferson's book, although it contains much about the theatre, shows him
to be an exception in this respect, even as he is in many others. He has
seen many countries and many kinds of men and things, and he has long
looked upon life with the thoughtful gaze of a philosopher as well as
the wise smile of a humourist. He can, if he likes, talk of something
besides the shop. His account of his life "lacks form a little," and his
indifference to "accurate statistics"--which he declares to be "somewhat
tedious"--is now and t