_Early Christian Art in Ireland_. By Margaret Stokes. (Published for the Committee of Council on Education by Chapman and Hall.) MADAME RISTORI (_Woman’s World_, January 1888.) Madame Ristori’s _Etudes et Souvenirs_ is one of the most delightful books on the stage that has appeared since Lady Martin’s charming volume on the Shakespearian heroines. It is often said that actors leave nothing behind them but a barren name and a withered wreath; that they subsist simply upon the applause of the moment; that they are ultimately doomed to the oblivion of old play-bills; and that their art, in a word, dies with them, and shares their own mortality. ‘Chippendale, the cabinet-maker,’ says the clever author of _Obiter Dicta_, ‘is more potent than Garrick the actor. The vivacity of the latter no longer charms (save in Boswell); the chairs of the former still render rest impossible in a hundred homes.’ This view, however, seems to me to be exaggerated. It rests on the assumption that acting is simply a mimetic art, and takes no account of its imaginative and intellectual basis. It is quite true, of course, that the personality of the player passes away, and with it that pleasure-giving power by virtue of which the arts exist. Yet the artistic method of a great actor survives. It lives on in tradition, and becomes part of the science of a school. It has all the intellectual life of a principle. In England, at the present moment, the influence of Garrick on our actors is far stronger than that of Reynolds on our painters of portraits, and if we turn to France it is easy to discern the tradition of Talma, but where is the tradition of David?