And the memory of that little incident helps me to a reflection on one detail of the actor's art which is more effective when fitly used, and more disastrous when neglected, than any other of the multitudinous things he has to know and to bear in mind. An exit is half the business of the most important scene ever written. You may play like an angel, you may hold the stage for half an hour and thrill your audience; but, after all, you may kill your supremest efforts by getting off clumsily. I write, of course, for the ignorant. The actor knows these things, and more than I can teach him into the bargain. But I had a singular instance of the fact in my own experience. It came early and gave me a lesson to be laid to heart. I never played before a more friendly audience. Good reports had gone ahead, and the house was willing, and I think was even eager, to be pleased. I had settled to that bright and happy confidence which is the actor's most blissful experience in comedy. I think I never played so well in my life as in that first act of 'Jim the Penman;' but the stage was vast in comparison with any on which I had until then appeared, and my customary business brought me only within half a dozen paces of the door-way by which I should have vanished. A sudden sense of strangeness and constraint came down upon me like a cloud. The happy feeling of confidence vanished in a whiff of chill spiritual wind. The last line was spoken before that unhappy half-dozen of paces was achieved; and I left the stage in a dead silence, which was as eloquent of failure as it had been one brief minute earlier of success. I played half as well next night, but disappeared with _aplomb_, with an effect as encouraging as the most exigent artist could demand. So painful a thing is it to learn a new trade! 'So much to learn, so much to do!' I am ready to propound a novel theory, and I am insolent enough to believe that I illustrate it in my own person. The time of full middle-age is that at which a man most readily adapts himself to a new art. It is at that time most assuredly necessary to accept certain physical limitations. I advise no hitherto unpractised person to seek excellence as a ground and lofty tumbler after five-and-forty. No sensible person who has attained that respectable altitude of years will try to make a _début_ as Romeo. But supposing that a lad of fifteen and a man of five-and-forty begin on the same day to study landscape-painting, which of the two do you think will get nearer Nature's secret in five years' time? Personally I shall back--_coteris paribus_--the man of middle age. Or if it come to acting, who is likely (physical limitations on both sides duly considered, of course) to offer you the better study of a bit of human nature--the matured observer or the unpractised un-regarding youth? I back the middle-aged man once more.