as Betterton, in wig and gown,--as Cato, moralizing on the soul's
eternity, and halting between Plato and the dagger. There was Woodward
as "The Fine Gentleman," with the inimitable rake-hell in which the
heroes of Wycherly and Congreve and Farquhar live again. There was
jovial Quin as Falstaff, with round buckler and "fair round belly."
There was Colley Cibber in brocade, taking snuff as with "his Lord,"
the thumb and forefinger raised in air, and looking at you for applause.
There was Macklin as Shylock, with knife in hand: and Kemble in the
solemn weeds of the Dane; and Kean in the place of honour over the
chimneypiece.

When we are suddenly taken from practical life, with its real workday
men, and presented to the portraits of those sole heroes of a world
Fantastic and Phantasmal, in the garments wherein they did "strut and
fret their hour upon the stage," verily there is something in the sight
that moves an inner sense within ourselves,--for all of us have an inner
sense of some existence, apart from the one that wears away our days:
an existence that, afar from St. James's and St. Giles's, the Law Courts
and Exchange, goes its way in terror or mirth, in smiles or in tears,
through a vague magic-land of the poets. There, see those actors--they
are the men who lived it--to whom our world was the false one, to whom
the Imaginary was the Actual! And did Shakspeare himself, in his life,
ever hearken to such applause as thundered round the personators of his
airy images? Vague children of the most transient of the arts, fleet
shadows on running waters, though thrown down from the steadfast stars,
were ye not happier than we who live in the Real? How strange you
must feel in the great circuit that ye now take through eternity! No
prompt-books, no lamps, no acting Congreve and Shakspeare there! For
what parts in the skies have your studies on the earth fitted you? Your
ultimate destinies are very puzzling. Hail to your effigies, and pass we
on!

There, too, on the whitewashed walls, were admitted the portraits of
ruder rivals in the arena of fame,--yet they, too, had known an
applause warmer than his age gave to Shakspeare; the Champions of the
Ring,--Cribb and Molyneux and Dutch Sam. Interspersed with these was an
old print of Newmarket in the early part of the last century, and sundry
engravings from Hogarth. But poets, oh, they were there too! poets who
might be supposed to have been sufficiently good fellows to be at