sentence than are needed to convey the actual thought that is uppermost in the speaker's mind; in order, therefore, to give his delivery an appearance of spontaneity, the actor should arrest the attention of the listener by the accentuation of those words which convey the central idea or thought of the speech he is uttering, and should keep in the background, by means of modulation and deflection of voice, the words with which that thought is ornamented. Macbeth should say: "That but this blow Might be the be-all and the end-all HERE, But HERE, upon this bank and shoal of time, We'd jump the life to COME.--But in these cases We still have judgment HERE; that we but teach BLOODY instructions, which, being taught, RETURN To plague the INVENTOR." If the emphasis fall upon the words marked, then these and no others should be the words inflected; but modern actors, if they inflect the right words, inflect the wrong ones too, until it becomes impossible for the listener to identify the sense by the sound. This artificial way of speaking verse seems traditional to the eighteenth century. David Garrick and Edmund Kean no doubt used a more natural delivery, and also Mrs. Siddons, though some of her exaggerations of emphasis probably were never heard at the Globe. Shakespeare would hardly have endorsed her reading of Lady Macbeth's words, "Give me the daggers!" There was nobody else to whom Macbeth could give them. At moments of tension, speech is always direct. A lady, _tete a tete_ with her husband at the breakfast-table, enjoying an altercation over the contents of the newspaper, would surely indicate the natural emphasis by exclaiming, "GIVE me the newspaper!" words that can, in this way, be spoken in half the time that Mrs. Siddons took to speak hers. The two and a half hours in which a play in Shakespeare's time was often acted would not be possible to-day, even without delays for acts and scenes, with the methods of elocution now in vogue. It is legitimate for Romeo to exclaim in his farewell to Juliet: "EYES, look your last! ARMS, take your last embrace!" or he may say: "Eyes, look your LAST! Arms, take your last EMBRACE!" but it is not correct to say: "EYES, look your LAST! ARMS, take your last EMBRACE!" which every Romeo persists in saying to-day; and this method of duplicating emphasis, being used by all the actors throughout the whole play, the time taken up in speaking it is at once doubled. Hence the need for excessive "prunings." * * * * *