The antique theatres of Greece and Rome stood open in the air unroofed to the sky, and were so vast, holding from ten thousand to two hundred thousand spectators, that the players in order not to be belittled and inaudible were raised on the high cothurnus and wore a metallic mask whose huge and reverberating mouth augmented the voice. The word persona is derived from _personare_, to sound through. Dramatis personæ originally meant masks, and only later came to denote the persons of the play. The conditions suppressed all the finer inflections of tone and the play of the features. The actor had to depend for his effects on measured declamation, imposing forms and attitudes, slow and appropriate movements, simple pictures distinctly outlined and set in bold relief. The characters principally brought forward were kings, heroes, prophets, demi-gods, deities. It was the stately representation of superhuman or exalted personages, full of exaggerated solemnity and pomp both in bearing and in speech. All this naturally arose from the circumstances under which the serious drama was developed,—the audience a whole population, the player at a distance from them, in the scenery of surrounding sea and mountains and the overhanging heaven. The traditions of the Classic School came directly down to the subsequent ages and gave their mould and spirit to the modern theatre. They have been kept up by the long list of all the great conventional tragedians in their stilted pose and stride and grandiose delivery, until the very word theatrical has come to signify something overdone, unreal, turgid, hollow, bombastic. But when, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, in Italy, Spain, Germany, France, and England, the drama revived and asserted itself in such an extended and deepened popular interest,—when the theatres were built on a smaller scale adapted for accurate seeing and hearing, and the actors and the stage were brought close to the limited and select audience,—when the plays, instead of dealing mainly with sublime themes of fate and the tragic pomp and grandeur of monarchs and gods, began to depict ordinary mortal characters and reflect the contents of real life,—the scene changed from an enormous amphitheatre where before a city of gazers giants stalked and trumpeted, to a parlor where a group of ladies and gentlemen exhibited to a company of critical observers the workings of human souls and the tangled plots of human life. The buskins were thrown off and the masks laid aside, the true form and moving displayed, living expression given to the features, and the changing tones of passion restored to the voice. Then the mechanical in acting gave way to the passionate; the Classic School, which was statuesque, receded, and the Romantic School, which was picturesque, advanced.