The volumes of theatrical history and biography that have been written and become popular since Garrick's day, prove that this is not wholly true, that we are not ungrateful to those who have instructed and amused us on the stage, and that we shall not willingly let their honoured memories die. The fact that the depressing feeling that they and their work will "soon be forgotten" still exists among members of the theatrical profession is, I venture to believe, some excuse for records such as this being issued during the lifetime of the artist, while memory is green, and appreciation can be written at first hand. Even if such works give little or no pleasure to their living subjects, it may be borne in mind that they will probably be of service to those future stage historians who will permanently inscribe their names on the tablets of fame. The passionate declaration of Dumas's Kean that, despite his troubles and torments, he would never while life was in him leave the stage, is an old tale. Actors, as a rule, love to die in harness, and it was in the full knowledge of this that T. W. Robertson caused his stage David Garrick to reply to Alderman Ingot, when he offered to double or treble his income if he would abandon his profession, "Leave the stage? Impossible!" Poor Sothern, who created the part, was staying with me when his physician wrote saying that if he wished to prolong his life he must give up all work. After a moment's depression the actor with a sudden impulse snatched a portrait of himself as Garrick from my wall, tore it from its frame, and in a large, firm hand, wrote beneath it: "Leave the stage? Impossible!" I have no doubt that Charles Wyndham, who, after Sothern's death, took up the part, and made it one of the greatest successes of the modern stage, feels the full import of the words every time he speaks them. And if the actors suffer so do the dramatists, or at all events the would-be dramatists. In an admirable little book called "Play Writing," the author gives sound advice to the ever-growing, ever-complaining army of the unacted. "Dramatic authorship," he says, "is to the profession of literature as reversing is to waltzing--an agony within a misery. A man who means to be a dramatist must be prepared for a life of never-ending strife and fret--a brain and heart-exhausting struggle from the hour when, full of hope, he starts off with his first farce in his pocket to the days when, involuntarily taking the advice of one of the early masters of his own craft--to wit, old rare Ben Jonson--he leaves 'the loathed stage and the more loathsome age.'"