chief actress, for, if promise fails not, it is to be a rigorously guarded home of nothing but the best in the realm of comedy. Like Miss George, Laura Hope Crews[219] has earned by long training and by brilliant accomplishment the admiration she now wins. She had been a child actress in the far West, and, returning to the stage in her ’teens, had undergone the rigorous training of stock company work in San Francisco and New York for a half dozen years before she attracted any considerable notice. Such an experience in American stock companies, with weekly changes of bill, means either a sinking to a dead level of mechanical acting, or a constantly enlarging technical resource. The latter was the case with Miss Crews. As Mr. Eaton has pointed out, though she has come to be looked upon as an actress of such sunny parts as Polly in _The Great Divide_, and the whimsical heroine of _Her Husband’s Wife_, it is because Miss Crews for so long went from such plays as Hoyt’s _A Bunch of Keys_, to others like _Magda_ and _Hedda Gabler_ that she is today not merely an attractive personality, but an actress of complete technical equipment. Such she has again proved herself to be by the finesse of her impersonation of the wife in _The Phantom Rival_. By virtue of the power of consistent impersonation which she brings to bear upon her warmly human heroines, her high spirits and her thoroughly trained resources of humorous suggestion, she has earned a high place as a _comédienne_; but the sincerity and the variety of her art would equip her at a moment’s notice to revert to the emotional heroines of a more sober drama. It is becoming too apparent that we have seen the last of the charming and delicate art of Annie Russell; the physical power and the emotional intensity of Nance O’Neil’s very real talent find their expression only in plays of a Bernhardtian type that to a great extent has gone out of fashion on the American stage; Rose Stahl, after a long career as America’s best stock actress, leaped into international fame by a single masterpiece of characterization (in _The Chorus Lady_) which she has not since had an occasion to duplicate; and the charming and well-grounded acting ability of Henrietta Crosman, always condemned to deal with second-rate plays, seems to have run its course, so far as the public is concerned. To replace these and the other actresses[220] who have dropped from the ranks of active service, or who will, before many years pass, do so, there is, as we have said, no lack of younger women. A stage that can count upon Helen Ware, Margaret Illington, Emma Dunn, Elsie Ferguson, Emily Stevens, Frances Starr, Jane Cowl, Martha Hedman, Doris Keane, Laurette Taylor, Irene Fenwick, and Florence Reed is suffering no weakness on its distaff side. If only our accomplished young actors were as numerous! For each of these women is more than a mere personality--she is a real actress, mistress of the tools of her trade.