the common symptoms of the malady upon him; the quivering lip,
the cowering knees, the teeth chattering; and could have sworn "that
man was frightened." But we forgot all the while--or kept it almost a
secret to ourselves--that he never once lost his self-possession; that
he let out by a thousand droll looks and gestures--meant at _us_, and
not at all supposed to be visible to his fellows in the scene, that
his confidence in his own resources had never once deserted him. Was
this a genuine picture of a coward? or not rather a likeness, which
the clever artist contrived to palm upon us instead of an original;
while we secretly connived at the delusion for the purpose of greater
pleasure, than a more genuine counterfeiting of the imbecility,
helplessness, and utter self-desertion, which we know to be
concomitants of cowardice in real life, could have given us?

Why are misers so hateful in the world, and so endurable on the stage,
but because the skilful actor, by a sort of sub-reference, rather than
direct appeal to us, disarms the character of a great deal of its
odiousness, by seeming to engage _our_ compassion for the insecure
tenure by which he holds his money bags and parchments? By this subtle
vent half of the hatefulness of the character--the self-closeness
with which in real life it coils itself up from the sympathies of
men--evaporates. The miser becomes sympathetic; _i.e._ is no genuine
miser. Here again a diverting likeness is substituted for a very
disagreeable reality.

Spleen, irritability--the pitiable infirmities of old men, which
produce only pain to behold in the realities, counterfeited upon a
stage, divert not altogether for the comic appendages to them, but in
part from an inner conviction that they are _being acted_ before us;
that a likeness only is going on, and not the thing itself. They
please by being done under the life, or beside it; not _to the life_.
When Gatty acts an old man, is he angry indeed? or only a pleasant
counterfeit, just enough of a likeness to recognise, without pressing
upon us the uneasy sense of reality?

Comedians, paradoxical as it may seem, may be too natural. It was the
case with a late actor. Nothing could be more earnest or true than the
manner of Mr. Emery; this told excellently in his Tyke, and characters
of a tragic cast. But when he carried the same rigid exclusiveness of
attention to the stage business, and wilful blindness and oblivion of
everything before th