The Room! And the smoke-reek, and the gas-glare of it. The whitewash of the walls, and the prints thereon of the actors in their mime-robes, and stage postures; actors as far back as their own lost Augustan era, when the stage was a real living influence on the manners and the age. There was Betterton in wig and gown--as Cato, moralising on the soul's eternity, and halting between Plato and the dagger. There was Woodward as "The Fine Gentleman," with the inimitable rakehell air in which the heroes of Wycherly and Congreve and Farquhar live again. There was jovial Quin as Falstaff, with round buckler and "fair round belly." There was Colley Cibber in brocade--taking snuff as with "his Lord," the thumb and forefinger raised in air--and looking at you for applause. There was Macklin as Shylock, with knife in hand; and Kemble, in the solemn weeds of the Dane; and Kean in the place of honor over the chimneypiece. When we are suddenly taken from practical life, with its real workday men, and presented to the portraits of those sole heroes of a World--Phantastic and Phantasmal, in the garments wherein they did "strut and fret their hour upon the stage," verily there is something in the sight that moves an inner sense within ourselves--for all of us have an inner sense of some existence, apart from the one that wears away our days: an existence that, afar from St. James's and St. Giles's, the Law Courts and Exchange, goes its way in terror or mirth, in smiles or in tears, through a vague magic land of the poets. There, see those actors! They are the men who lived it--to whom our world was the false one, to whom the Imaginary was the Actual. And did Shakspeare himself, in his life, ever hearken to the applause that thundered round the Personators of his airy images? Vague children of the most transient of the arts, fleet shadows of running waters, though thrown down from the steadfast stars, were ye not happier than we who live in the Real? How strange you must feel in the great circuit that ye now take through eternity! No prompt-books, no lamps, no acting Congreve and Shakspeare there! For what parts in the skies have your studies on the earth fitted you? Your ultimate destinies are very puzzling. Hail to your effigies, and pass we on!