There is a commonplace about the evanescent glory of actors that will hardly bear close scrutiny. It is said that, as they live more intensely than other men, enjoying their reward on the spot, so they die more completely, and leave behind nothing but a name. Even so, are they worse off than the famous authors whom nobody ever reads? Or than the famous painters whose works have disappeared? Which is the more live figure for us to-day, John Kemble, who played in the _Iron Chest_, or William Godwin, who wrote the original story? Is Zeuxis or Apelles anything more than a name? It is said that whereas other artists survive in their work, the actor’s dies with him. But we make of every work of art a palimpsest, and it is for us what we ourselves have written over its original text—so that the artist only lives vicariously, through our own life—while the dead actor’s work stands inviolate, out of our reach, a final thing. Lamb says of Dodd’s Aguecheek, “a part of his forehead would catch a little intelligence, and be a long time in communicating it to the remainder.” Nothing can alter that forehead now; but if Dodd could have left it behind him, we should be all agog to revise the verdict. So Mrs. Siddons was famous for her graceful manner of dismissing the guests at Macbeth’s banquet. Nothing can impair that grace now; could it have been handed down, we should be having two opinions about it. Dead actors, then, live again in the pages that commemorate them, and they live more securely than the artists whose works survive. They are no longer the sport of opinion.