Wigs are still matters of vital interest to the actors, and it is to be noted that the theatrical hairdressers have of late years devoted much study to this branch of their industry. The light comedian still indulges sometimes in curls of an unnatural flaxen, and the comic countryman is too often allowed to wear locks of a quite impossible crimson colour. Indeed, the headdresses that seem only contrived to move the laughter of the gallery, yet remain in an unsatisfactory condition. But in what are known as "character wigs" there has been marked amendment. The fictitious forehead is now very often artfully joined on to the real brow of the performer, without those distressing discrepancies of hue and texture which at one time were so very apparent, disturbing credibility and destroying illusion. And the decline of hair in colour and quantity has often been imitated in the theatre with very happy ingenuity. Heads in an iron-gray or partially bald state--varying from the first slight thinning of the locks to the time when they come to be combed over with a kind of "cat's cradle" or trellis-work look, to veil absolute calvity--are now represented by the actors with a completeness of a most artistic kind. With the ladies of the theatre blond wigs are now almost to be regarded as necessaries of histrionic life. This may be only a transient fashion, although it seems to have obtained very enduring vitality. Dr. Veron, writing of his experiences as manager of the Paris Opera House forty years ago, affirms: _"Il y a des beautes de jour et des beautes du soir; une peau brune, jaune, ou noire, devient blanche a eclat de la lumiere; les cheveux noirs reussissent mieux aussi au theatre que les cheveux blonds."_ But the times have changed; the arts of the theatrical toilet have no doubt advanced greatly. On the stage now all complexions are brilliant, and light tresses are pronounced to be more admirable than dark. Yet Dr. Veron was not without skill and learning on these curious matters. He discourses learnedly in regard to the cosmetics of the theatre--paint and powder, Indian ink and carmine, and the chemical preparations necessary for the due fabrication of eyebrows and lashes, for making the eyes look larger than life, for colouring the cheeks and lips, and whitening the nose and forehead. And especially the manager took pride in the capillary artifices of his establishment, and employed an "artist in hair," who held almost arrogant views of his professional acquirements. "My claim to the grateful remembrance of posterity," this superb _coiffeur_ was wont to observe, "will consist in the fact that I made the wig in which Monsieur Talma performed his great part of Sylla!" The triumphs of the scene are necessarily short-lived; they exist only in the recollection of actual spectators, and these gradually dwindle and depart as Time goes and Death comes. Nevertheless something of this wig-maker's fame