Much of Mr. Poel’s best work went into the training of an intelligent company. His rehearsing ensured a certain smoothness and expressiveness of general movement. Mr. Bassett Roe bore himself with dignity and ease as the Cardinal, through whose influence--for such appears to be Mr. Poel’s reading of the situation--the forces of the Church in its bad period, the terrors of the Inquisition, are brought to bear upon the ill-fated Duchess. Mr. Murray Carson, as Daniel de Bosola, filled a great part well. Miss Mary Rorke, with a dignified presence, a rich voice completely at her service, and an unusual sense of the simplicity of pathos, was, as the Duchess, an interesting and satisfactory figure. And Miss Hall Caine filled out to completeness, by her intelligence and sunny, sympathetic style, the small part of Cariola. Some people thought the ‘Dance of Death,’ as Mr. Arthur Dillon--a learned, helpful student of the time--had cleverly devised it, was too horrible: it had to me the fascination at once of the beautiful and the _macabre_. Horrors there were in the performance, and in the piece, of necessity; but the Independent Theatre--sometimes too little in touch with the main-stream of English life and thought--may well permit itself to give a piece in which Literature is burdened with horrors. Has it not more than once indulged its supporters with things in which horrors are unburdened with Literature? (_Academy_, 29th October 1892.) REMBRANDT It is a bold thing to say, but yet I think it is a true one,--and the saying is welcome to surprise the academic and conventional--that if the painted work of Rembrandt did not exist at all, and if his drawings were unknown, the three hundred etchings that he wrought during some forty years of labour would assert for him, amongst all capable judges, a claim to that place, precisely, which he is now admitted to occupy. It is not that in saying this I would underrate for a moment the skill of the pure colourist, the dexterity of the juggler who plays with subtle hue, the master of the material which is applied to prepared canvas; but that if one asks oneself, ‘What are the qualities, really, which in any Art lead us to assign to the practitioner of it his particular and permanent station?’ one finds shortly that one’s answer has to be the following, or something like it: ‘The qualities are an alert freshness and comprehensiveness of spirit, an individual vision of the world, and the knowledge how best to wield the instrument by which that vision is expressed.’ In the case of a writer, language is the instrument, and Sterne’s or Molière’s perception and sensitiveness are made evident in words. In the case of a pictorial artist, paint may be the instrument, or water-colour, or the humble but expressive pencil--or the instrument may be that which was Rembrandt’s more than any other’s: it may be the needle of the etcher.