The casual sight of an old Play Bill, which I picked up the other day--I know not by what chance it was preserved so long--tempts me to call to mind a few of the Players, who make the principal figure in it. It presents the cast of parts in the Twelfth Night, at the old Drury-lane Theatre two-and-thirty years ago. There is something very touching in these old remembrances. They make us think how we _once_ used to read a Play Bill--not, as now peradventure, singling out a favorite performer, and casting a negligent eye over the rest; but spelling out every name, down to the very mutes and servants of the scene;--when it was a matter of no small moment to us whether Whitfield, or Packer, took the part of Fabian; when Benson, and Burton, and Phillimore--names of small account--had an importance, beyond what we can be content to attribute now to the time's best actors.--"Orsino, by Mr. Barrymore."--What a full Shakspearian sound it carries! how fresh to memory arise the image, and the manner, of the gentle actor! Those who have only seen Mrs. Jordan within the last ten or fifteen years, can have no adequate notion of her performance of such parts as Ophelia; Helena, in All's Well that Ends Well; and Viola in this play. Her voice had latterly acquired a coarseness, which suited well enough with her Nells and Hoydens, but in those days it sank, with her steady melting eye, into the heart. Her joyous parts--in which her memory now chiefly lives--in her youth were outdone by her plaintive ones. There is no giving an account how she delivered the disguised story of her love for Orsino. It was no set speech, that she had foreseen, so as to weave it into an harmonious period, line necessarily following line, to make up the music--yet I have heard it so spoken, or rather _read_, not without its grace and beauty--but, when she had declared her sister's history to be a "blank," and that she "never told her love," there was a pause, as if the story had ended--and then the image of the "worm in the bud" came up as a new suggestion--and the heightened image of "Patience" still followed after that, as by some growing (and not mechanical) process, thought springing up after thought, I would almost say, as they were watered by her tears. So in those fine lines-- Write loyal cantos of contemned love-- Hollow your name to the reverberate hills-- there was no preparation made in the foregoing image for that which was to follow. She used no rhetoric in her passion; or it was nature's own rhetoric, most legitimate then, when it seemed altogether without rule or law.