Camille. The plays she has produced since her separation from Irving would indicate that she realizes that, no matter how well an actress holds time in abeyance, extreme maturity is not the fit portrayer of youth. Recently Miss Terry has presented "Nance Oldfield," "Captain Brassbound's Conversion" and "The Good Hope."

Miss Terry still has the power to create character as convincingly as in the old days. She still has the daring and the confidence in her own ability that made her earlier work so successful. She has justified this confidence in her latest production, Bernard Shaw's "Captain Brassbound's Conversion," since, by her own power and art alone, she saves the play from ignominious failure, and her company, with but one exception, from merited adverse criticism. So completely does she dominate the stage by her personality, that not until the drop of the final curtain does one realize that she was the only woman in the play.

Miss Terry possesses intelligence, ease and impulsiveness, grace of gesture and action, and a voice rich, supple, varied and under perfect control. She frankly takes for granted the sympathy of her audience, and secure in the knowledge that it is hers, frisks about the stage with a joyousness, an enjoyment and a charm that are irresistible. There is no forcing of "points" in her acting, nothing vague, elusive or fragile.

The real secret of Ellen Terry's power of portraying character so vividly lies in the fact that she conceives it as a whole and acts it in the light of that whole, so that the character of the last act is the logical outcome of the character of the first. Thus her portrayal is always symmetrical, natural, smooth and consistent-there is no startling, illogical or, rather, unmotivated development. Her conception, therefore, stands out prominently, and her words and actions seem of comparatively small importance. Yet to a marked degree she "suits. the action to the word, the word to the action." On her first appearance in Boston as Lady Cecily Waynflete, the actress's memory failed several times; but so completely had she invested herself in the character, that she was not even confused by her forgetfulness, and the greater part of the audience never suspected.

Age has not deprived Miss Terry of her almost girlish exuberance of spirits, of her delicacy and dignity, of that charm which reaches across the footlights and grips. She still possesses “infinite variety" of tone and gesture and action; still, she plays about the stage with an inimitable air of ownership, like a child in a sand pile; she disdains now, as ever, to make "points," to be in any way artificial, affected or spotty in her work. Hers is the art of perfect naturalness. She assumes the sympathy and understanding of her audience, as though it had been promised beforehand.

Possibly the most striking characteristic of this eminent actress is the power she has of creating an atmosphere of poetry. She is always enveloped in it, so to speak, even when she is impersonating such an unpoetic figure as Lady Cecily. It is the poetry of natural womanliness and beauty, a poetry that is touched with mystery, yet is real. We yearn to reach it, yet still prefer to behold it from a distance, like a gorgeous autumn sunset that fills us with infinite longing for something we would not have. We feel that here is some one noble, pure and lovely, and we dare not approach too near for fear that she may be, after all, an illusion. There is nothing cold nor intentionally mysterious about this poetic atmosphere; on the contrary, like the sunset, it is warm and rich and glowing, full of the color of life, and resplendent with its beauty.

Mr. William Winter* has summed up Miss Terry's art as it exists to-day in a few characteristic words: "The great actress," he says, "still charms without effort, still creates illusion by spontaneity and poetic grace, still interests the mind and touches the heart. . . . No one of her performances ever lacked authority, symmetry, charm, the quality and force of character, and the beauty of natural art. Throughout all of them, however, the dominant attribute has been the individuality, the woman's nature, the potential something that could not and cannot be defined and that no auditor ever wished to resist." David Carb.

The New York Tribune, January 29, 1907.

VAUDEVILLE

Through the stifled shuffling of the crowd the violin squeaks and giggles-the cello wails. Oppressive warmth, continual murmur, half darkness everywhere but on the glary stage. There the brawny acrobat swings on the trapeze, holding his sister by his teeth. Awful silence-sudden crash of the big drum, as they both alight on the stage and trip effeminately to the footlights. Prolonged, enthusiastic applause, drowning the violin and the cello. The curtain falls, and rises for other acrobats with similar marvelous feats; then come the gaudy singers who shriek, and the clog dancers, and the equilibrists, and the trained dogs, and the untrained comedians in the one-act plotless, witless farce-success, then acrobats again. . . So on everlastingly, and the darkness grows hotter and dustier.

Are we infants? Have we just escaped from the cradle? Are we hospital nurses, or convicts freed after ten years of confinement? Are we country lasses, just-tamed savages, feeble lunatics? Whowhat in the world are we, so to breathe the hot dust, and applaud?

The violin squeaks and giggles-the cello wails. Oh, the wisdom of the cello!

Rudolph Altrocchi.

Instructor

Editorial

By steady climbing, unheedful of barriers of reason and pitfalls of absurdity, the young instructor system at Harvard is gradually attaining the height of the ridiculous. For many years The Young this branch of our tree of knowledge, the faculty, has been becoming more and more unworthy of the University. The education of promising young men, though officially under the supervision of learned faculty members, has actually been in the hands of young, inexperienced instructors and "assistants," the majority of whom have been vapid and futile, without backbone and without inspiration. Their only qualification for appointment has frequently been the marks they attained as undergraduates, a totally inadequate criterion, as every one knows, not only of a man's ability to teach, but even of his bare knowledge of the course in which the mark was received. We have had the spectacle of young instructors with a greater love for the cigarette and the genial society of loafers, than for the goddess of learning and the improvement of the Freshman mind, assisting in difficult courses; men whose own usefulness in the world is a debatable question; men without question glaringly unfit to stand as models, mentors and moulders before impressionable underclassmen. Such figures have fortunately been rare, but there have been hosts of others only a degree less dangerous-the pedantic, the uninspired, the petty, who have crushed originality and broken the back of enthusiasm.

This term the young instructor system has developed a new absurdity in the appointment to assistant instructorships, in a difficult course (many of whose members are Seniors), of two men whose

class has not yet graduated. The personality of these men and their ability are not the matters at issue. The significant point is that these men are correcting themes of their own classmates in a course of which they, the instructors, probably know little more than the students who are taking the course, for the course is one that has never been given before. It is a case of the blind leading the blind. Without casting any aspersions on the young instructors involved, we might hazard a guess that a dozen of the men whose themes they are so assiduously correcting would be quite as capable as they of decorating bi-weekly reports with more or less clever red-ink comments.

The fact that the Seniors who are acting as instructors in this course have received their degrees, and the students whom they are instructing have not, in no way mitigates the absurdity of a system of instruction by classmates. Even a grind, or any other who has received his degree in three years, has mortal instincts, and is not necessarily above "getting back" at a classmate for past favors. Prejudices and petty grudges are bound to exist, and the most honest of instructors may read a theme through black spectacles when the author happens to be a classmate whom he thoroughly hates. At best, criticism by classmates is amusing and useless; at worst, it is prejudiced and unfair.

There is an enormous difference between instruction of Seniors by Seniors and instruction of Freshmen by Seniors or first-year graduates; yet even the latter, more prevalent, custom is dangerous. It is proverbial that continued residence at Harvard from Freshman infancy to the professorial old age is not good for the soul. A man who goes directly from his undergraduate work here into the work of teaching other Harvard undergraduates is bound to be narrow and of little value as a teacher. The inspiration he has drawn is the same