It is a sense of this extraordinary combination of power necessary to the formation of a great dramatic poet, which has rendered the masterpieces of this art so general an object of devout admiration, to men of the greatest genius who have ever appeared upon earth. Euripides wept when he heard a tragedy of Sophocles recited at the Isthmian games; he mourned, but his own subsequent greatness proved without reason, the apparent impossibility of rivalling his inimitable predecessor. Milton, blind and poor, found a solace for all the crosses of life in listening, in old age, to the verses of Euripides. Napoleon, at St Helena, forgot the empire of the world, on hearing, in the long evenings, the masterpieces of Corneille read aloud. Stratford-on-Avon does not contain the remains of mere English genius, it is the place of pilgrimage to the entire human race. The names of persons of all nations are to be found, as on the summit of the Pyramids, encircled on the walls of Shakspeare's house; his grave is the common resort of the generous and the enthusiastic of all ages, and countries, ad times. All feel they can "Rival all but Shakspeare's name below." If the combination of qualities necessary to form a first-rate dramatic poet is thus rare, hardly less wonderful is the effort of genius to sustain the character of a great actor. The mind of the performer must be sympathetic with that of the author; it must be cast in the same mould with the original conceiver of the piece. To form an adequate and correct conception of the proper representation of the leading characters in the masterpieces of Sophocles, Shakspeare, or Schiller, requires a mind of the same cast as that of those poets themselves. The performer must throw himself, as it were, into the mind of the author; identify himself with the piece to be represented; conceive the character in reality, as the poet had portrayed it in words, and then convey by acting this _second conception_ to the spectators. By this double distillation of thought through the soul of genius, a finer and more perfect creation is sometimes formed, than the efforts of any single mind, how great soever, could have originally conceived. It may well be doubted whether Shakspeare's conception of Lady Macbeth or Desdemona was more perfect than Mrs Siddons's personation of them; or whether the grandeur of Cato or Coriolanus, as they existed in the original mind of Addison, or the patriarch of the English stage, equalled Kemble's inimitable performances of these characters. Beautiful as were the visions of Juliet and Rosalind which floated before the mind of the Bard of Avon, it may be doubted if they excelled Miss Helen Faucit's exquisite representation of those characters. The actor or actress brings to the illustration of the great efforts of dramatic genius, qualities of a different sort, _in addition_ to those which at first pervaded the mind of the author, but not less essential to the