author_, _the director_, _the stage manager_, that the true credit of the creation belongs. Jefferson did not really create _Rip_; through a certain undeniable art of his _he_ simply put into visible form what _Washington Irving_ in the story suggested and Dion Boucicault so cleverly fitted to his personality for the stage; _he utilized every bit of the descriptive business of the tale_.” Seldom has so much error and injustice been packed into so small a space! It is true that, in many instances, individual actors have abundantly prospered by the long-continued repetition of a single performance: this fact, I remember, was impatiently noticed many years ago by Don Piatt, who testily expressed in a Washington newspaper an ardent wish that old _Rip Van Winkle_ and old _Fanchon_ would get married and both retire. It is not because the individual actor _finds_ “a particular part, a sort of entertainment, a combination of all the excellent things” he has done throughout his life, that he often becomes most famous in one part; it is because, in every art, the artist’s range of _supreme_ merit is, comparatively, narrow; no matter how well he can do fifty things, he can, as a rule, do one thing best of all,--that thing being always one for which, whether he happens to like it or not, he possesses a peculiar capacity, one with which he possesses a close artistic and physical affinity, so that, in the doing of it, he can make an ampler and more effective display of his talents than he can make in any other way; and also because the public (with a generally sound instinctive preference for seeing an actor in the thing which he can do best) insists on seeing him in it and will not go in large numbers to see him in anything else.