your straw-coloured beard, your orange-tawny
beard, your purple-in-grain beard, or your French-crown-colour beard,
your perfect yellow." Clearly the beard was an important part of the
make-up at this time. Farther on, Bottom counsels his brother clowns:
"Get your apparel together, good strings to your beards, new ribbons
to your pumps;" and there are especial injunctions to the effect that
Thisbe shall be provided with clean linen, that the lion shall pare
his nails, and that there shall be abstinence from onions and garlic
on the part of the company generally.

Old John Downes, who was prompter at the theatre in Lincoln's Inn
Fields from 1662 to 1706, and whose "Roscius Anglicanus" is a most
valuable history of the stage of the Restoration, describes an actor
named Johnson as being especially "skilful in the art of painting,
which is a great adjument very promovent to the art of elocution." Mr.
Waldron, who, in 1789, produced a new edition of the "Roscius
Anglicanus," with notes by Tom Davies, the biographer of Garrick,
decides that Downes's mention of the "art of painting" has reference
to the art of "painting the face and marking it with dark lines to
imitate the wrinkles of old age." This, Waldron continues, "was
formerly carried to excess on the stage, though now a good deal
disused. I have seen actors, who were really older than the characters
they were to represent, mark their faces with black lines of Indian
ink to such a degree that they appeared as if looking through a mask
of wire." And Mr. Waldron finds occasion to add that "Mr. Garrick's
skill in the necessary preparation of his face for the aged and
venerable Lear, and for Lusignan, was as remarkable as his performance
of those characters was admirable."

In 1741 was published "An Historical and Critical Account of the
Theatres in Europe," a translation of a work by "the famous Lewis
Riccoboni, of the Italian Theatre at Paris." The author had visited
England in 1727, apparently, when he had conversed with the great Mr.
Congreve, finding in him "taste joined with great learning," and
studied with some particularity the condition of the English stage.
"As to the actors," he writes, "if, after forty-five years' experience
I may be entitled to give my opinion, I dare advance that the best
actors in Italy and France come far short of those in England." And he
devotes some space to a description of a performance he witnessed at
the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fi