Shaker, the Calvinist and the Catholic, the tailor, the gymnast, the gambler, the bully, the hero, the poet, and the saint, stand unveiled before us. How the habitual life reveals itself in the bearing is clearly seen in the sailor when he leaves his tossing ship for the solid shore. His sensation of the strange firmness of the earth makes him tread in a sort of heavy-light way,—half wagoner, half dancing-master. There is always this appearance of lightness of foot and heavy upper works in a sailor, his shoulders rolling, his feet touching and going. To know how consistently to construct an ideal character of any one of these kinds, at any given height or depth in the historic gamut of humanity, and to be able to embody and enact it with the harmonious truth of nature, is the task of the consummate actor. And to be qualified to catalogue all these attributes of human being and manifestation with accuracy, recognizing every fitness, detecting every incongruity, is the business of the dramatic critic. Who of our ordinary newspaper writers is competent to the work? Yet the youngest and crudest of them never hesitates to pronounce a snap judgment on the most renowned tragedians as if his magisterial “we” were the very ipse dixit of Pythagoras! Still further, the task of the actor and of the critic is made yet more complicated and difficult by the varied modifications of all the classes of character indicated above under the influence of specific passion. The great dramatic passions, which may be subdivided into many more, are love, hatred, joy, grief, jealousy, wonder, pity, scorn, anger, and fear. To obtain a fine perception and a ready and exact command of the relations of the apparatus of expression to all these passions in their different degrees as manifesting different styles of character, to know for each phase of excitement or depression the precise adjustment of the limbs, chest, and head, of intense or slackened muscles, of compressed or reposeful lips, of dilated or contracted nostrils, of pensive or glaring or fiery or supplicating eyes, of deprecating or threatening mien, of firm or vacillating posture, is an accomplishment as rare as it is arduous. All this is capable of reduction by study and practice to an exact science, and then of development into a perfect art. For every passion has its natural law of expression, and all these laws are related and consistent in an honest and earnest character, incoherent only in a discordant or hypocritical character. There is an art to find the mind’s construction in the face. The spirit shines and speaks in the flesh. And a learned eye looks quite through the seemings of men to their genuine being and states. This is indeed the very business of the dramatic art,—to read the truths of human nature through all its attempted disguises, and expose them for instruction. How minute the detail, how keen the perception, how subtle and alert the power of