In England the development of pantomime was upon different lines, due to the influence of the Italian comedy-of-masks, with its unchanging figures of Pantaleone, Columbina, and Arlecchino. These figures were still further simplified; and to Pantaloon, Columbine, and Harlequin there was added the characteristically British figure of the Clown. The most famous impersonator of the clown was Grimaldi, whose memoirs were edited by Charles Dickens. The mantle of Grimaldi fell upon an American, G. L. Fox, whose greatest triumph, in the late sixties, was in a pantomime called 'Humpty-Dumpty'--the riming prolog of which was written by A. Oakey Hall (then Tweed's mayor of New York). G. L. Fox and his brother, C. K. Fox (who was the inventor of the comic scenes), had been preceded in America by a family of French pantomimists known as the Ravels; and they were followed by the family known as the Hanlon-Lees, who had originally been acrobats, and who appeared in a French play, in which the other characters spoke while the Hanlon-Lees expressed themselves only in gesture. Here again Scribe had been before them, with his libretto for the opera of 'Masaniello,' in which there is a principal part for a pantomimic actress, Fenella. And when the great French actor, Frédéric Lemaître, had lost his voice by overstrain, Dennery wrote a play for him, the 'Old Corporal,' in which he appeared as a soldier of Napoleon's Old Guard, who had been stricken dumb during the retreat from Russia. This exploit of Frédéric Lemaître's is not as extraordinary as it seems. A truly accomplished actor ought to be able to forgo the aid of speech. Even in our modern plays gesture is more significant than speech. To place the finger on the lips is more effective than to say "Hush!" The tendency of the modern drama on our amply lighted picture-frame stage is to subordinate the mere words to the expressive action. In Mr. Gillette's 'Secret Service,' for example, the impression is sometimes made rather by gesture than by speech; and a large portion of the most effective scene, that where the hero is wounded while he is sending a telegraph message, is presented in pantomime with little assistance from actual dialog. Similar effects are to be found in many of Mr. Belasco's plays, especially in the 'Darling of the Gods.' In all good acting the gesture precedes the word; and often the gesture makes the word itself unnecessary, because it has succeeded in conveying the impression and in making the full effect by itself, so that the spoken phrase lags superfluous. III