"Incomparably the finest acting I ever saw," wrote Dickens from Paris twenty years ago, "I saw last night at the Ambigu." The actor was Frederic Lemaitre, and the part he played was that of Georges de Germany in the drama of _Thirty Years, or the Life of a Gambler_. At this time (February, 1855) Lemaitre was already so old a man that Dickens was surprised to see him still playing, and the part was one which the actor had created originally twenty-eight years before that. He first played it at the Porte Saint-Martin Theatre in 1827, close upon half a century ago. "Never," continues Dickens, "did I see anything in art so exaltedly horrible and awful. In the earlier acts he was so well made up and so light and active that he really looked sufficiently young. But in the last two, when he had grown old and miserable, he did the finest things, I really believe, that are within the power of acting. Two or three times a great cry of horror went all round the house. When he met in the inn-yard the traveler whom he murders, and first saw his money, the manner in which the crime came into his head--and eyes--was as truthful as it was terrific. This traveler, being a good fellow, gives him wine. You should see the dim remembrance of his better days that comes over him as he takes the glass, and in a strange dazed way makes as if he were going to touch the other man's, or do some airy thing with it, and then stops and flings the contents down his hot throat, as if he were pouring it into a limekiln. But this was nothing to what follows after he has done the murder, and comes home with a basket of provisions, a ragged pocket full of money, and a badly-washed, bloody right hand, which his little girl finds out. After the child asked him if he had hurt his hand, his going aside, turning himself round, and looking over all his clothes for spots was so inexpressibly dreadful that it really scared one. He called for wine, and the sickness that came upon him when he saw the color was one of the things which brought out the curious cry I have spoken of from the audience. Then he fell into a sort of bloody mist, and went on to the end groping about, with no mind for anything except making his fortune by staking this money and a faint dull kind of love for the child. It is quite impossible to satisfy one's self by saying enough of such a magnificent performance. I have never seen him come near its finest points in anything else. He said two things in a way that would put him far apart from all other actors. One to his wife, when he has exultingly shown her the money, and she has asked him how he got it--'I found it;' and the other to his old companion and tempter, when he charged him with having killed that traveler, and he suddenly went headlong mad and took him by the throat and howled out, 'It wasn't I who murdered him--it was misery!' And such a dress! such a face! and, above all, such an extraordinarily guilty, wicked thing as he made of a