It is testimony to Thackeray’s own liking for the theater that he is continually telling us that this or that character went to the play. He also informs us that Henry Esmond was the author of the ‘Faithful Fool,’ a comedy performed by Her Majesty’s Servants and published anonymously, attaining a sale of nine copies, whereupon Esmond had the whole impression destroyed. And the first of the George Warringtons wrote two plays, ‘Carpezan’ and Pocahontas,’ both of them tragedies, the first of which caught the public taste, whereas the second failed to prove attractive. We are all aware that Becky Sharp took part in the private theatricals at Gaunt House, making a most impressive Clytemnestra; but we are less likely to recall the hesitating suggestion that she may have been the Madame Rebecque who failed to please when she appeared in the ‘Dame Blanche’ at Strasburg in 1830. It was natural enough that Becky should go on the stage, since her mother had been a ballet-dancer. Altho neither Thackeray nor Dickens ever attempted to write a novel of theatrical life, each of them gave us an inside view of a provincial stock-company in the earlier years of the nineteenth century. In ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ we are introduced to the actors and actresses under the management of Mr. Crummles; and in ‘Pendennis’ we have a less elaborate study of the actors and actresses under the management of Mr. Bingley. The group that Dickens portrays is more boldly drawn and more richly colored than the group that Thackeray sketches in with a few illuminating strokes. “What a light of benevolence it is that plays round Crummles and the Phenomenon and all those poor theatrical people in that charming book,” said Thackeray in his lecture on ‘Charity and Humor.’ “What a humor! And what a good humor!” Altho in these episodes neither Dickens nor Thackeray aimed at the penetrating inquisition into the histrionic temperament that we find in Henry James’s ‘Tragic Muse’ and in Howells’s ‘Story of a Play,’ there is both validity and originality in Thackeray’s portrait of Miss Fotheringay. In all the dozens and scores of theatrical novels that I have read, I do not recall any other attempt to show the actress who is only an instrument in the hands of a superior intelligence, a woman who has the divine gift and who can display it only when she is taught, perhaps by one himself deficient in the mimetic faculty but possessed of interpretative imagination. Possibly Thackeray bestows overmuch stupidity on the Fotheringay; but she was not too stupid to profit by the instruction of the devoted Bows. She had beauty, voice, manner, the command of emotion, without which the tragic actor is naught; and all she lacked was the intelligence which would enable her to make the most of her native endowment.