from the very _vox angelica_ down to the gruff basses where lions roar and serpents hiss. This is a result of the complete combination of instinctive sensibility in the mind and developed elocutionary apparatus in the body. The muscular connections of the thoracic and abdominal structures are brought into unity, every part playing into all the parts and propagating every vibration or undulatory impulse. At the slightest volition the entire space sounding becomes a vital whole, all its walls, from the roof of the mouth to the base of the inside, compressing and relaxing with elastic exactitude, or yielding in supple undulation so as to reveal in the sounds emitted precisely the tinge and energy of the dominant thought and emotion. Then the voice appears a pure mental agent, not a physical one. It seems to reside in the centre of the breath, using air alone to articulate its syllables. Commanding, without any bony or meaty quality, both extremes,—the thread-like diminuendo of the nightingale and the stunning crash of the thunderbolt,—it gives forth the whole contents of the man in explicit revelation. This perfection of the Italian School has been confined to the lyric stage. Perhaps the nearest examples to it on the dramatic stage were Edmund Kean for a short time in his best period, and Forrest and Salvini in our own day. Forrest had it not in its complete finish. He grew up wild, as it were, on a wild continent, where no such consummate training had ever been known. Left to himself and to nature, he did everything and more than everything that could have been expected. But _perfection_ of voice, a detached vocal mentality which uses the column of respiratory air alone as its instrument, sending its vibrations freely into the sonorous surfaces around it, he did not wholly attain. His voice seemed rather by direct will to employ the muscles to seize the breath and shape and throw the words. He could crash it in sheeted thunder better than he could hurl it in fagoted bolts, and he loved too much to do it. In a word, his voice lacked, just as his character did, the qualities of intellectualized spirituality, ethereal brilliancy, aerial abstraction and liberty from its muscular settings and environment. Had these qualities been fully his in body and soul, in addition to what he was, he would have been the unrivalled paragon of the stage. The fibres of the backbone and of the solar plexus were too much intertangled with the fibres of the brain, the individual traits in him were too closely mixed with the universal, for this. But nevertheless, as it was, his voice was an organ of magnificent richness and force for the expression of the elemental experiences of humanity in all their wide ranges of intelligence, instinct, and passion. It could do full justice to love and hate, scorn and admiration, desire, entreaty, expostulation, remorse, wonder, and awe, and was most especially effective in pity, in command, and in irony and sarcasm. His