The Romance of the English Stage.
By Percy Fitzgerald.
Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott
& Co.

According to Carlyle, the only biographies in the English language worth
reading--of course with implied exceptions--are the lives of players.
Over English biographers in general there hangs, as he says, a
"Damocles' sword of Respectability," forbidding revelations that might
either offend somebody's sensibilities or exhibit the subject in any
other than a dignified attitude and sober light, and, as a consequence,
compelling the suppression of details which were needed to render the
portraiture characteristic and lifelike. Actors being as a class outside
the pale of "respectability," no such sacrifice is demanded in their
case; and whereas in their lifetime they assume many characters, and
though constantly before the public are known to it only in disguised
forms and borrowed attributes, after death their personality is laid
bare, and they are made to contribute once more to the entertainment of
the world by a last appearance in which nothing is unreal and nothing
dissembled or concealed. This, of course, applies far better to a former
period than to the present, as does also the explanation of the same
fact offered by Mr. Fitzgerald--namely, the romantic interest attaching
to the stage and exciting curiosity in regard to those wonderful beings
who appear before us as embodiments of passion and poetry, humor and
whimsicality, transporting us into an ideal world, and leaving us, when
they vanish, in a prosaic one to which they do not seem to belong.
Illusions of this kind are scarcely retained by even the young--perhaps,
indeed, least of all by the young--of our generation. Moreover, the
changes which society has undergone during the last half century have
rubbed out much that was distinctive in the actor's life, and have given
to manners and habits in general a uniformity that leaves little that is
striking and piquant to describe. The adventures and the eccentricities
of actors and actresses of a bygone time were paralleled or exceeded by
those of other classes. At present such sources of interest are rare in
any class, and we are obliged to have recourse to sensational novels or
the records of crime.

Future biographers are no more likely to have such a subject as Samuel
Johnson than such a one as George Frederick Cooke; while both Boswell
and Dunlap, had they written in our day, would probably have been much
more