Neither can it be said that the theatre has no more consequence now than it has always enjoyed. At the time when Gothic architects and Italian painters expressed the meaning of their own ages, there was nothing like a real drama in existence, and the Roman theatre was never comparable with ours. The Greeks, indeed, had a stage which was an important element of their civilization, and which took the character of their time, giving and receiving influence; but their stage was essentially different from that of the moderns. Its success did not depend upon the individual performer; its pageantry was perhaps as splendid as what we now see; but the play of the countenance, that great intellectual opportunity offered an actor by our drama, was not known. In this see also a characteristic of the present age. Individuality is a distinctive peculiarity of the nineteenth century; it has been for centuries gradually becoming more possible; but every man now works his own way, acts himself, more completely than ever before. Therefore appropriate is it that the drama should give importance to the individual, and allow a great actor to incarnate and illustrate in his own form and face feelings and passions that formerly were only hinted at; for remember that the Greek players usually wore masks, while their amphitheatres were so large that in any event the expression of the features was lost. With this individuality, this opportunity for each to develop his own identity and intensity, the nineteenth century strangely combines another peculiarity, that of association. All these units, these atoms, so marvellously distinct, are incorporated into one grand whole; though each be more, by and of himself, than ever before, yet the great power, the great motor, is the mass. The mass is made powerful by the added importance given to each individual. And you may trace without conceit a state of things behind the scenes very similar to this in front of the footlights. In the theatre, also, the many workers contribute to a grand result. The manager would be as powerless in his little empire, without important assistants, as a monarch without ministers and people. What makes the French army and the American so irresistible is the thought that each private is more than a machine, is an intellectual being, understands what his general wants, fights with his bayonet at Solferino or his musket at Monterey on his own account, yet subject to the supreme control. And the theatre, with all its actors and scene-painters and costumers and carpenters and musicians, is only an army on a different scale. The forces of the stage answer to the generals and colonels, the marshals and privates, all marching and working and fighting for the same end. Those splendid dramatic triumphs of Charles Kean were only illustrations of the principle of association,--only illustrations of the readiness of the stage to adapt itself to the times, to seize hold of whatever is suggested by the