r they may say of it,
it is a gallant and a susceptible age, and all men bow to loveliness, and
all women recognize a talent for clothes. We do not say that there is not
such a thing as dramatic art, and that there are not persons who need as
severe training before they attempt to personate nature in art as the
painter must undergo who attempts to transfer its features to his canvas.
But the taste of the age must be taken into account. The public does not
demand that an actor shall come in at a private door and climb a steep
staircase to get to the stage. When a Star from the Private Theatricals
descends upon the boards, with the arms of Venus and the throat of Juno,
and a wardrobe got out of Paris and through our stingy Custom-house in
forty trunks, the plodding actor, who has depended upon art, finds out,
what he has been all the time telling us, that all the world's a stage,
and men and women merely players. Art is good in its way; but what about
a perfect figure? and is not dressing an art? Can training give one an
elegant form, and study command the services of a man milliner? The stage
is broadened out and re-enforced by a new element. What went ye out for
to see?

A person clad in fine raiment, to be sure. Some of the critics may growl
a little, and hint at the invasion of art by fashionable life, but the
editor, whose motto is that the newspaper is made for man, not man for
the newspaper, understands what is required in this inspiring histrionic
movement, and when a lovely woman condescends to step from the
drawing-room to the stage he confines his descriptions to her person, and
does not bother about her capacity; and instead of wearying us with a
list of her plays and performances, he gives us a column about her
dresses in beautiful language that shows us how closely allied poetry is
to tailoring. Can the lady act? Why, simpleminded, she has nearly a
hundred frocks, each one a dream, a conception of genius, a vaporous
idea, one might say, which will reveal more beauty than it hides, and
teach the spectator that art is simply nature adorned. Rachel in all her
glory was not adorned like one of these. We have changed all that. The
actress used to have a rehearsal. She now has an "opening." Does it
require nowadays, then, no special talent or gift to go on the stage? No
more, we can assure our readers, than it does to write a book. But homely
people and poor people can write books. As yet they cannot act.