While on this subject, let me notice that, with the exception of one Matthew Coppinger, a subaltern player in the Stuart days, no English actor has ever suffered death on the scaffold. Mat’s offence was not worse than the mad Prince’s on Gad’s Hill, and it must be confessed that one or two other gentlemen of the King’s or Duke’s company ‘took to the road’ of an evening, and perhaps deserved hanging, though the royal grace saved them. Neither in England nor France has an actor ever appeared on the scaffold under heavy weight of crime. As for taking to the highway, baronets’ sons have gone that road on their fathers’ horses; and society construed lightly the offences of highwaymen who met travellers face to face and set life fairly against life. In England, Coppinger alone went to Tyburn. In France, I can recall but two out of the many thousands of actors who have trodden its very numerous stages,--not including an occasional player who suffered for political reasons during the French Revolution. One of the two was Barrières, a Gascon, who, after studying for the church and the law, turning dramatic poet and mathematician, and finally enlisting in the army, obtained leave of absence, and profited thereby by repairing to Paris, and appearing at the Théâtre Français, in 1729, as Mithridate. His Gascon extravagance and eccentricity caused at first much amusement, but he speedily established himself as an excellent general actor, and forgot all about his military leave of absence. Not so his colonel, who had no difficulty in laying his hand on the Gascon recruit, who was playing in his own name in Paris, and under authority of a furlough, the period of which he had probably exceeded--the document itself he had unfortunately lost. Barrières was tried, condemned, and shot, in spite of all the endeavours made to save him.