Thus the Theatre, technically so called, is but one of the lesser spheres of the dramatic art. The tragedies and comedies coldly elaborated there are often tame and poor to those enacted with the flaming passions of life itself in parlors and kitchens, in palace and hut and street. Every one of us is essentially an actor, the setting of his performance furnished independently of his will wherever he goes, all his schemes included and borne on in a divine plan deeper than he dreams. Our own organism is the primary theatre, the proscenia of brain and heart teeming with dramas which link our being and destiny with those of all other actors from the beginning to the end of the world. Every spot in which man meets his fellow-men is a secondary theatre, arrayed with its scenery of circumstances, where each has his rôle and all the characters and parts interplay upon one another with mixtures of truth and deceit, skill and awkwardness, aspiration and despair. One of the chief differences is that some get behind the scenes and sharply understand a little of what is going on, while most take their parts blindly, ignorant of what either themselves or others are about, alternately before the foot-lights and back of the drop. And, meanwhile, what is the blue, glittering wilderness of infinitude itself but the theatre fitted up by God, with its doors of birth and death and its curtains of day and night, for the training of the total company of living creatures with which He has stocked it, from animalcule to archangel? The Manager has assigned in the evolution of the universal plot their just rôles to all the performers, with incessant transmigrations of drudge and star, lackey and hero, sultan and beggar, while the years move on and the generations pass and return, the whole space of the stage being crowded as thickly with shifting masks and disguises as a sunbeam is with motes. All place being thus theatrical, and all conscious existence thus having something dramatic, it is quite obvious how inadequate must be their appreciation of the art of acting who recognize its offices only in the play-house. The play-house is merely the scene of its purposed and deliberate _exhibition_ as a professional art. In its different kinds, with its different degrees of consciousness and complexity, as a matter of instinct and culture it is _practised_ everywhere. Freeing our minds from prejudices on the one side, and from indifference on the other, let us, then, approach the subject with an earnest effort to learn the truth and to see what its lessons are.