I was, perhaps rather naïvely, surprised the other day to hear an actor asking for Hazlitt’s “View of the English Stage.” Actors in general, whether correctly or incorrectly I cannot say, are reputed to be not enthusiastically given to reading. On the face of it, the thing seems likely enough. Their business is to be men of action and talk and the busy world—not sedentary contemplative, cloistered students. Your bookworm is as a rule a shy, retiring solitary; the very opposite of your actor who must not only boldly show himself but take a pride in being stared at. Logically, then, I ought not to have been as shocked as I was when the late Henry Neville some years ago roundly declared to me that an actor “should never read.” Yet the thought of a life without literature seemed so appalling! It is possible, however, to be a reader, and a voracious reader, yet not to read Hazlitt’s stage criticisms. The epoch is gone. Kean is long since dead. Our theatrical interests to-day are widely different from those of our ancestors a century ago. And Hazlitt’s criticisms have not the loose, discursive, impressionistic, personal, intimate charm of his other essays, his “Table Talk,” his “Round Table,” or his “Plain Speaker.” They simply show him in the “dry light” of the specialist, the closet-student turned playgoer, but these give a warm, coloured, speaking likeness of the whole man. I was surprised, then, to hear my friend the actor asking for Hazlitt’s stage criticisms. I venture to inquire what, particularly, he wanted them for. “Oh,” he said, “I like to read about Kean.”