words, people are come to the conclusion that the best actors are
not to be found on the boards of the Haymarket or the Adelphi, but
in the world at large--at the Exchange, in the parks, on railroads or
river-steamers, at the soirees of learned societies, in Parliament, at
Civic dinners or Episcopal visitations.

Why has the masquerade ceased to interest and amuse? Simply because no
travestie of costume, no change of condition, is so strikingly ludicrous
as what we see on every side of us. The illiterate man with the revenue
of a prince; the millionaire who cannot write his name, and whom
yesterday we saw as a navvy; the Emperor who, a few years back, lodged
over the bootmaker's; the out-at-elbow followers of imperial fortune,
now raised to the highest splendour, and dispensing hospitalities more
than regal in magnificence;--these are the spectacles which make the
masquerade a tiresome mockery; and it is exactly because we get the
veritable article for nothing that we neither seek playhouse nor
ballroom, but go out into the streets and highways for our drama,
and take our Kembles and Macreadys as we find them at taverns, at
railway-stations, on the grassy slopes of Malvern, or the breezy cliffs
of Brighton. Once admit that the wild-flower plucked at random has more
true delicacy of tint and elegance of form, and there is no going back
to the tasteless mockery of artificial wax and wire. The broad boards of
real life are the true stage; and he who cannot find matter of interest
or amusement in the piece performed, may rely upon it that the cause is
in himself, and not in the drama. Some will say, The world is just what
it always was. People are no more fictitious now than at any other time.
There was always, and there will be always, a certain amount of false
pretension in life which you may, if you like, call acting. And to this
I demur _in toto_, and assert that as every age has its peculiar
stamp of military glory, or money-seeking, or religious fervour, or
dissipation, or scientific discovery, or unprofitable trifling, so the
mark of our own time will be found to be its thorough unreality. Every
one is in travestie. Selfishness is got up to play philanthropy, apathy
to perform zeal, intense self-seeking goes in for love of country; and,
to crown all, one of the most ordinary and vulgar minds of all Europe
now directs and disposes of the fate and fortunes of all Christendom.

Daily habit familiarises us with the acti