Joseph Jefferson has led a life of noble endeavour and has had a career of ample prosperity, culminating in honourable renown and abundant happiness. He was born in Philadelphia, February 20, 1829. He went on the stage when he was four years old and he has been on the stage ever since. His achievements as an actor have been recognised and accepted with admiration in various parts of the world; in Australia and New Zealand and in England, Scotland, and Ireland, as well as in the United States. Among English-speaking actors he is the foremost living representative of the art of eccentric comedy. He has not, of late years, played a wide range of parts, but, restricting himself to a few characters, and those of a representative kind, the manner in which he has acted them is a perfect manner--and it is this that has gained for him his distinctive eminence. Jefferson, however, is not simply and exclusively an actor. His mind is many sided. He has painted landscape pictures of a high order of merit,--pictures in which elusive moods and subtle sentiments of nature are grasped with imaginative insight and denoted and interpreted with a free, delicate, and luminous touch. He has also addressed the public as an author. He has written an easy, colloquial account of his own life, and that breezy, off-hand, expeditious work,--after passing it as a serial through their Century Magazine,--the Century Company has published in a beautiful volume. It is a work that, for the sake of the writer, will be welcomed everywhere, and, for its own sake as well as his, will everywhere be preserved.