There was nothing of this sort in Booth or Irving, in Jefferson or Coquelin; they were far above it; they were free from self-assertion and even from self-consciousness,—altho of course they could not but be aware of their own outstanding position. In fact, I cannot recall any successful actor of my acquaintance who was abnormally self-centered, or who took himself too seriously. Sometimes, it is true, I have found an actor who had not yet established his position and who now and again seized a chance to let me know that he had played this or that important part not unsuccessfully. But this was not boastful self-praise, even if it might so seem to the uninformed listener; it was only a supplying of information not otherwise available. A writer or a painter has no need to call attention to his book or his picture, because these survive to speak for themselves, even if there are only a few who have them in mind. But the work of the actor has no permanence; it perishes as it comes into being; it instantly ceases to be, except as a memory; and it is as a memory that the actor feels himself called upon to revive it. The difference is that whereas the book of the author, the picture of the artist may be only overlooked, the performance of the actor might be actually unknown to us if he himself did not tell us about it. II The first actor whom I came to know was one of the most companionable, the genial John Brougham. In 1869, as a boy I had been present at the opening and at the closing nights of his brief management of the little playhouse in Twenty-fourth Street, behind the Fifth Avenue hotel—a playhouse which not long after became the Fifth Avenue Theater of Augustin Daly and which was rebuilt as the Madison Square Theater by Steele Mackaye. At Brougham’s I had seen his ever-delightful burlesque, ‘Pocahontas,’ in which he himself was the rollicking King Powhatan; and I saw also a later burlesque of his, ‘Much Ado about a Merchant of Venice,’ in which he was an amusing but rather Hibernian Shylock. So it was that when I was elected to the Lotos Club, in the spring of 1871 (while I was still an undergraduate at Columbia College) I seized the earliest opportunity to make Brougham’s acquaintance.