It is not only natural, it is also wise, for a star to see to it that his part is interesting and that it holds its interest from the first act to the last. He cannot help knowing that he is the lodestone which attracts the audiences. They pay their money to see him; and they are not getting their money’s worth if they do not see enough of him. But the spectators are best pleased with the star himself, they are most likely to hold him in delighted remembrance and to want to see him when next he comes to town, if he has given them a well-balanced play, in which every part is filled by a performer who can get out of it all it is worth. There are some stars who are almost self-effacing, and who do not even care whether or not they have their full share of the emphatic situations upon which the curtain falls. It was pointed out by not a few of those who saw ‘Leah Kleschna,’ when Mrs. Fiske produced it with a brilliant and well-balanced cast,—John Mason, George Arliss, Charles Cartwright, William B. Mack,—that the star let Mack have the curtain of the third act. VII If it was difficult for Booth fifty years ago and for Irving thirty years ago to find well-graced and well-trained actors to sustain the secondary characters in Shakspere’s comedies and tragedies, it is far more difficult to-day, when our dramatists, even when they are poets, are rarely tempted to write plays in five acts and in blank verse. Our modern drama is composed in pedestrian prose; and the men and women of our theaters have little or no occasion to speak the language of the gods. They are used to a dialog which aims at an apparent reproduction of the speech of everyday life; and therefore they have not been called upon to acquire the art of delivering the rhythmic utterance of tragic heroes and heroines. They are all striving to be “natural,” as befits a stage whereon the scenery and the furnishings are as far as may be those of real life. They are likely to have a distaste for blank verse, which cannot but seem to them artificial, stilted, “unnatural.”