rket-place,
bargaining and haggling with the draper, and then marching off with the
roll of cloth, with the understanding that the shop-man is to call at
his house in the course of an hour for the money. In the next act we
have Maitre Pathelin at his fireside with his wife, to whom he relates
his trick and its projected sequel, and who greets them with Homeric
laughter. He gets into bed, and the innocent draper arrives. Then
follows a scene of which the liveliest description must be ineffective.
Pathelin pretends to be out of his head, to be overtaken by a
mysterious malady which has made him delirious, not to know the draper
from Adam, never to have heard of the dozen ells of cloth, and to be
altogether an impossible person to collect a debt from. To carry out
this character he indulges in a series of indescribable antics,
out-Bedlams Bedlam, frolics over the room dressed out in the
bed-clothes and chanting the wildest gibberish, bewilders the poor
draper to within an inch of his own sanity, and finally puts him
utterly to rout. The spectacle could only be portentously flat or
heroically successful, and in Got's hands this latter was its fortune.
His Sganarelle, in the "Medecin Malgre Lui," and half a dozen of his
characters from Moliere besides--such a part, too, as his Tibia, in
Alfred de Musset's charming bit of romanticism, the "Caprices de
Marianne"--have a certain generic resemblance with his treatment of the
figure I have sketched. In all of these the comicality is of the
exuberant and tremendous order, and yet, in spite of its richness and
flexibility, it suggests little connection with high animal spirits. It
seems a matter of invention, of reflection and irony. You cannot
imagine Got representing a fool pure and simple--or at least a passive
and unsuspecting fool. There must always be an element of shrewdness
and even of contempt; he must be the man who knows and judges--or at
least who pretends. It is a compliment, I take it, to an actor, to say
that he prompts you to wonder about his private personality; and an
observant spectator of M. Got is at liberty to guess that he is both
obstinate and proud.

In Coquelin there is perhaps greater spontaneity, and there is a not
inferior mastery of his art. He is a wonderfully brilliant, elastic
actor. He is but thirty-five years old, and yet his record is most
glorious. He too has his "actual" and his classical repertory, and here
also it is hard to choose. As the y