actors whose reputations they have made-are making, or have still to make; the ever-blooming fruitful trees of the managerial vineyard. Where are their authors? Dead, perhaps, and forgotten. The actor is often wrongfully accused of imaginary vices, when, with more justice, he might be found guilty of real ingratitude. When he meets with a great success, he considers it his own, and seldom thinks of the man whose fancy has breathed into him the breath of life. When he fails-he never fails; it is always the author. The actor is never" damned;" it is always the piece that is sent to perdition.

You may be curious to learn why actors commit such mistakes (as they undoubtedly do) in weighing the acting value of an untried play. I can only account for it in supposing them to be led away, when their verdict is favourable, by some peculiar brilliance of the language, brought out, it may be, by the unusual skill of the author in reading; forgetting the all-important interest and movement of the story, and their necessary connection with the development of character. The fact is, fine thoughts, enshrined in appropriate language, are dead weights upon the stage, unless they are struck like sparks from the action of the fable. So well do the performers understand this principle in their sober moments, that they give the literary composition the almost contemptuous title of "words," while they dignify the movements of the characters with the name of "business." When their verdict is unfavourable before the trial of a

play, it may arise from the fact of the parts being numerous and equally written. An actor is not, by virtue of his profession, more intelligent or logical than nine-tenths of the human race, and he is accustomed to judge a good deal by the evidence of his senses. If his share in the particular drama is contained upon a very small number of the copyist's slips, or "lengths," he is apt to overlook the quality of the part in his dissatisfaction with the quantity. When he is left out of one or more scenes, he complains of losing his spirit; talks of "going on" jaded, and being compelled to "work himself up" again; without considering how much and well the actors who have just "gone off" may have prepared the expectant house for his appearance. If you give him even the weakest things to do, and the weakest things to say, he will still bless you, if allowed almost to live in the eyes of his audience.

66

side of a small

with your back

This passion for quantity you will find more openly displayed when your piece is accepted; when the characters are cast," and when you come as I will suppose you to have come to the wearying task of rehearsal. As you sit on a property-chair, by the property-table, near the centre and front of the stage, to the yawning orchestra, you may turn to the cold, empty benches of the pit, the sheet-hidden glories of the boxes, and the blinking sunlight coming through the prison-like loopholes above the gallery; or you may watch the mumbling groups upon the boards, and those who stand in the gloom of the side- wings glaring at you, if they hold the small characters, as if you were their bitterest enemy.

"Sir," a dissatisfied small comedian will say, in the expression of his face, "you have stabbed me in my reputation. You have given me a part unworthy of my abilities. During the whole time that I played the leading business in the Theatre Royal, Stow-in-the-Wold, I was never so insulted and underrated."

You will be waited for outside the stage door by a few of the discontented, and asked to "write up" certain parts, without any reference to your story. You will be plied with managerial suggestions about the "business" of your play; and here I should always advise you to be patient and attentive. As a young dramatic writer you may be faulty in your stage mechanism. You may have kept one of your characters in a cupboard or behind a screen too long, without letting him make a sign, so that the audience are in danger of overlooking his position. You may not have given sufficient dialogue between the exit and entrance of a particular character, to allow him time for the total change of costume you have directed. You may have made the same mistake in the dialogue of a front scene (known technically as a "carpenter's scene"), when your play requires a complicated view to be arranged behind it. You may even have so far imitated a certain German dramatist in his stage directions as to have not only ordered the sound of a coat being brushed behind the scenes at a particular point, but the sound of brushing a coat of a particular colour.

I will not dwell much upon the agonies of a "first night," as they vary considerably, according to the author's constitution. One popular dramatic writer whom I know, never appears at the theatre on these occasions, and is always in the country, shooting, boating, or cricketing, according to the season. He treats play-making as a business, and acts like a philosopher. Some men, like the late Justice Talfourd, are never tired of seeing their own productions; while others avoid them, not for my philosopher's reason, but because every performance appears to them as critical as a first performance. Without endowing you with any extraordinary sensitiveness I can imagine many things occurring that will annoy you sorely. The leading actors will be nervous, uncertain in their proper words, and disposed to interpolate, or "gag," until their memories are refreshed by the prompter. The minor parts will be mistakenly rendered, or slurred; the dresses and "making up" will be exaggerated, or against your meaning; the scenery will stick; a wandering cat may leap across the stage; or a lengthy interval between the acts will seem to you calculated to irritate the audience. You have laughed at acting absurdities in other men's pieces; especially at the old father in Schiller's play of the Robbers, who is half-an-hour dying in a night-gown and manacles; and now you will have an opportunity of enjoying them in your own. Your lover may be too fat; your comic character too thin; your beautiful heroine too old. Your minor gentlemen may walk about in palatial drawing-rooms with hats upon their heads, with slop-shop suits upon their bodies, and muddy

blucher boots upon their feet; your rustic damsels may glide in faultless evening costume about muddy Portsmouth Streets; and your serious character may die so naturally that the house will hardly understand him. These things, and many like them, you will have to tolerate on your road to dramatic success; and it may be fortunate for you that your lot is cast in an amiable or uncritical age. Pieces are never now "damned" with that spite and vigour which distinguished our fathers' days; and a manager hardly knows that a play is unpopular until he learns it from the falling off in his "houses."

The pecuniary rewards that your wit and ingenuity will bring you, are neither mean nor dazzling. For your comedy or drama you may obtain only fifty pounds, or you may obtain three hundred. Your burlesque may produce you twenty pounds, or may produce you a hundred ; and your farce, or one act comedietta, may bring you ten pounds, twenty pounds, or fifty. These are the prices you may obtain for the London acting copyright from a London manager; or instead of this, you may agree to receive a certain nightly payment so long as your production will keep its place in the bills. Whatever you may agree to take, remember that it represents the value of your play; and let us hear no complai ́s of under-payment, even if the piece should prove an unexampled success. The manager takes it as a speculation, involving considerable outlay and risk, and any profit it may bring him he is fully entitled to. You will publish your play with the usual dramatic publisher, getting nothing for the bookcopyright, unless it happens to be a burlesque, or a drama. When this is done, you will become a member of the Dramatic Authors' Society, where, by an entrance fee of two guineas, you receive something for the performance of your piece by the country theatres. There are upwards of a hundred of these theatres in the United Kingdom, one-fourth perhaps of which pay a certain annual fixed rental to the society for the liberty of performing all the plays of its members. This forms the staple of the society's receipts; and after a percentage has been deducted for collection, it is equally divided amongst the members whose pieces have appeared in the country bills, in shares that represent so much per act per night. This country nightly act-money may be small-perhaps less than two shillings, taking the average-yet it produces a fair, regular, mortgageable income upon those plays that are generally popular.

With this last information, I must lead you from amongst the false glitter, dust and cobwebs that are found behind the scenes. I have not shown you anything with a view of checking your ambition, but rather of giving you a little knowledge of the path vou appear so anxious to tread.

Roundabout Papers.-No. IX.

ON A JOKE I ONCE HEARD FROM THE LATE THOMAS HOOD.

HE good-natured reader who has perused some of these rambling papers has long since seen (if to see has been worth his trouble) that the writer belongs to the oldfashioned classes of this world, loves to remember very much more than to prophesy, and though he can't help being carried onward, and downward, perhaps, on the hill of life, the swift milestones marking their forties, fifties-how many tens or lustres shall we say?-he sits under Time, the white-wigged charioteer, with his back to the horses, and his face to the past, looking at the receding landscape

and the hills fading into the gray distance. Ah me! those gray, distant hills were green once, and here, and covered with smiling people! As we came up the hill there was difficulty, and here and there a hard pull to be sure, but strength, and spirits, and all sorts of cheery incident and companionship on the road; there were the tough struggles (by Heaven's merciful will) overcome, the pauses, the faintings, the weakness, the lost way, perhaps, the bitter weather, the dreadful partings, the lonely night, the passionate grief-towards these I turn my thoughts as I sit and think in my hobby-coach under Time, the silver-wigged charioteer. The young folks in the same carriage meanwhile are looking forwards. Nothing escapes their keen eyes-not a flower at the side of a cottagegarden, nor a bunch of rosy-faced children at the gate: the landscape is all bright, the air brisk and jolly, the town yonder looks beautiful, and do you think they have learned to be difficult about the dishes at the inn?

Now, suppose Paterfamilias on his journey with his wife and children in the sociable, and he passes an ordinary brick house on the road with an ordinary little garden in the front, we will say, and quite an ordinary knocker to the door, and as many sashed windows as you please, quite common and square, and tiles, windows, chimney-pots, quite like others; or suppose, in driving over such and such a common, he sees an ordinary tree, and an ordinary donkey browsing under it, if you like-wife and