players are doomed to penury and tattered robes
in country places, dreaming to the last of a London engagement; how many
wretched daubers shiver and shake in the ague-fit of alternate hopes
and fears, waste and pine away in the atrophy of genius, or else turn
drawing-masters, picture-cleaners, or newspaper-critics; how many
hapless poets have sighed out their souls to the Muse in vain, without
ever getting their effusions farther known than the Poet's Corner of a
country newspaper, and looked and looked with grudging, wistful eyes
at the envious horizon that bounded their provincial fame!--Suppose an
actor, for instance, 'after the heart-aches and the thousand natural
pangs that flesh is heir to,' _does_ get at the top of his profession,
he can no longer bear a rival near the throne; to be second or only
equal to another is to be nothing: he starts at the prospect of a
successor, and retains the mimic sceptre with a convulsive grasp:
perhaps as he is about to seize the first place which he has long had in
his eye, an unsuspected competitor steps in before him, and carries off
the prize, leaving him to commence his irksome toil again. He is in a
state of alarm at every appearance or rumour of the appearance of a
new actor: 'a mouse that takes up its lodgings in a cat's ear'(2) has a
mansion of peace to him: he dreads every hint of an objection, and least
of all, can forgive praise mingled with censure: to doubt is to insult;
to discriminate is to degrade: he dare hardly look into a criticism
unless some one has tasted it for him, to see that there is no offence
in it: if he does not draw crowded houses every night, he can neither
eat nor sleep; or if all these terrible inflections are removed, and he
can 'eat his meal in peace,' he then becomes surfeited with applause and
dissatisfied with his profession: he wants to be something else, to be
distinguished as an author, a collector, a classical scholar, a man
of sense and information, and weighs every word he utters, and half
retracts it before he utters it, lest if he were to make the smallest
slip of the tongue it should get buzzed abroad that _Mr. ---- was only
clever as an actor!_ If ever there was a man who did not derive more
pain than pleasure from his vanity, that man, says Rousseau, was no
other than a fool. A country gentleman near Taunton spent his whole
life in making some hundreds of wretched copies of second-rate pictures,
which were bought up at his death by