impression he gives
you of having a general conception of human life and of seeing the
relativity, as one may say, of the character he represents. Of all the
comic actors I have seen he is the least trivial--at the same time that
for richness of detail his comicality is unsurpassed. His repertory is
very large and various, but it may be divided into two equal
halves--the parts that belong to reality and the parts that belong to
fantasy. There is of course a vast deal of fantasy in his realistic
parts and a vast deal of reality in his fantastic ones, but the general
division is just; and at times, indeed, the two faces of his talent
seem to have little in common. The Duc Job, to which I just now
alluded, is one of the things he does most perfectly. The part, which
is that of a young man, is a serious and tender one. It is amazing that
the actor who plays it should also be able to carry off triumphantly
the frantic buffoonery of Maitre Pathelin, or should represent the
Sganarelle of the "Medecin Malgre Lui" with such an unctuous breadth of
humor. The two characters, perhaps, which have given me the liveliest
idea of Got's power and fertility are the Maitre Pathelin and the M.
Poirier, who figures in the title to the comedy which Emile Augier and
Jules Sandeau wrote together. M. Poirier, the retired shop-keeper who
marries his daughter to a marquis and makes acquaintance with the
incommodities incidental to such a piece of luck, is perhaps the
actor's most elaborate creation; it is difficult to see how the
portrayal of a type and an individual can have a larger sweep and a
more minute completeness. The _bonhomme_ Poirier, in Got's hands,
is really great; and half a dozen of the actor's modern parts that I
could mention are hardly less brilliant. But when I think of him I
instinctively think first of some role in which he wears the cap and
gown of the days in which humorous invention may fairly take the bit in
its teeth. This is what Got lets it do in Maitre Pathelin, and he leads
the spectators' exhilarated fancy a dance to which their aching sides
on the morrow sufficiently testify.

The piece is a _rechauffe_ of a mediaeval farce, which has the credit of
being the first play not a "mystery" or a miracle piece in the records
of the French drama. The plot is of the baldest and most primitive. It
sets forth how a cunning lawyer undertook to purchase a dozen ells of
cloth for nothing. In the first scene we see him in the ma