“If the world be, indeed, as ’twas said, but a stage, The dress only is changed ’twixt the acts of an age. From the dark tiring-chamber behind straight reissue With new masks the old mummers; the very same tissue Of passionate antics that move through the play, With new parts to fulfil and new phrases to say.” An old Greek writer, speaking of Alexander of Pheræ, who reigned in Thessaly only ten months, and then was slain, calls him, in derision of his brief lease of power, a theatrical tyrant, a mere stage king, who, as it were, walked on only to walk off again. But the palace of the Cæsars, Plutarch remarks, received four emperors in a less space of time, one entering, and another making his exit, as if to fret and strut each his little hour upon the stage. How soon the stage directions, Enter Galba, enter and exit Otho, enter and exit Vitellius, lapse in _Exeunt omnes_! In Charles the Sixth’s ordinance, authorising the players of the “Mysteries of the Passion” (towards the close of the fourteenth century), that poor crazed monarch’ styles them his “loved and dear co-mates.” And what could be juster? Michelet asks. “A hapless actor himself, a poor player in the grand historic mystery, he went to see his co-mates’—saints, angels, and devils, perform their miserable travestie of the Passion. He was not only spectator; he was spectacle as well. His people went to see in him the Passion of royalty.” Players, the abstract and brief chronicles of the time, Hazlitt calls the motley representatives of human nature. They are the only honest hypocrites, he says (and hypocrite, by the way, is classically a correct name for them, though Hazlitt may not have remembered or meant it): their life is a voluntary dream, a studied madness—it being the height of their ambition to be “beside themselves:”—to-day kings, to-morrow beggars, it is only when they are themselves that they are nothing: made up of mimic laughter and tears, they wear the livery of other men’s fortunes, till their very thoughts are not their own. “They are, as it were, train-bearers in the pageant of life, and hold a glass up to humanity, frailer than itself. We see ourselves at second-hand in them.... The stage is an epitome, a bettered likeness of the world, with the dull part left out: and indeed, with this omission, it is nearly big enough to hold all the rest.” Sir Thomas Overbury had, two centuries before, written characteristically to the same purport. “All men have beene of his occupation,” writes the ill-starred knight of a good actor; “and indeed, what hee doth fainedly, that doe others essentially: this day one plays a monarch, the next a private person. Here one acts a tyrant, on the morrow an exile: a parasite this man to-night, to-morrow a precisian,” and so of divers others. “And why not players strut in courtiers’ clothes? For these are actors, too, as well as those.” Or, to top (Pope) Alexander the Great with Glorious John (Dryden):