To me there have been a lot of good actors in the world and one mighty one—unfortunately not an American and more unfortunately already an old woman when I first saw her—but Sarah Bernhardt had the power to do something to me that no one else could ever do. I had no critical judgment of her at all. She spoke, and I listened and believed. Edwin Booth still seems to me to be the greatest of the others, although a long way behind the “Divine Sarah.” I saw Booth first as Hamlet during my second year at Harvard in the winter of 1890. I saw him later with Modjeska and Otis Skinner in several plays and with Lawrence Barrett the following year in OTHELLO. He was as simple and as true in his acting as any of our fine actors of to-day, although the method of his time was declamatory and artificial. I dimly recall the elder Salvini in some version of Dr. Bird’s THE GLADIATOR, but I was too young at the time to carry away any more definite impression than that he had the loudest voice I had ever heard. Jefferson had great skill and a wonderful personality and his “Rip,” the model for the Lightnin’ Bills, the Old Soaks and all of their lovable disreputable brotherhood, remains towering above them all. Richard Mansfield I thought very like the little girl who had a little curl—when he was bad he was awful. In some of her parts, especially in THE TAMING OF THE SHREW and in a lightweight, imported comedy called THE LOVE CHASE, I have never seen Ada Rehan’s equal. Janauschek had a real tragic power, and at her best Modjeska was superb. Just how to place Maude Adams I have never known, but I do know that she has charmed and fascinated me so often that I think it only fair to give her the credit of listing her with the great. If no names in our theater to-day stand quite so high as these, I think it is the writer’s fault rather than the actors’, or possibly the fault of the audiences who have turned away from the romantic play to the grim and reticent drabness of the naturalistic drama. The glamor and the sweep of the old declamatory school naturally furnished the actor with a better chance to score than he has to-day. Then, of course, the great passions of the romances of thirty years ago find no response in our audiences. Life is quite as amazing as it ever was but by no means as mysterious. We have dissected and psychoanalyzed ourselves and one another past the point where we stand in awe of any one’s “darkened soul” and advise calomel. Then too our audiences are different; even thirty years ago thousands of our people thought the theater a place of evil and were convinced that anything that represented romance or the glamorous was sinful. The death of this notion was a very healthy symptom and the start toward a sane understanding of life.