conformity with its resolve to maintain its empire, the country has been compelled-yes, compelled-to abandon its attitude of abstention from the affairs of Europe, and to enter upon a career of positively open rivalry with the nearest of its continental neighbours?

COB. I do indeed perceive that the nation has taken. that course; but it is for you to convince me of its necessity.

PAL. Pardon me; it is for you to convince the nation to the contrary. Come, Mr. Cobden, you are too practical a man not to understand that politics is not an art to be practised by theorising in vacuo; and that no principles can be sound, no advice good, except relatively to the instincts, the resolves, the prejudices, if you like to call them so, of the people to whom they are addressed. If the people of England had been prepared, or could within any period of time worth taking into account have been induced to consent, to the loss of their empire, the principle of your foreign policy would have been sound, and your advice good. But seeing that the contrary proposition was and remains true, the one is unsound and the other bad.

COB. And do you yourself believe, my lord, that this immense, unwieldy, everywhere vulnerable empire of ours, with its ever-increasing demands on a limited population and a not unlimited exchequer, can be indefinitely retained? Do you think it possible?

PAL. That, my dear Mr. Cobden, is a question the discussion of which we may well reserve as an employment for eternity. It is enough to say that the English people

have not yet been brought to regard it as an impossibility ; and you went, therefore, the wrong way to work in counselling them to disable themselves for the defence of possessions which they do not, as yet, doubt their capacity to retain.

GARRICK AND GEORGE HENRY LEWES.

GAR. Nay, sir, I cannot let you entrap me into an argument till you have first satisfied my curiosity. You, who have come fresh from the world of life and its doings, may be excused your appetite for philosophising; but I, for my part, am anxious to hear and converse about men and women. If you are for talk of the other sort, and will not tell me about living players and living plays until you have determined the first principles of the dramatic art to your satisfaction, I must needs hand you over at once to Mr. Diderot.

LEW. The determination of first principles will keep, Mr. Garrick-nothing so well, to the best of my experience. Indeed I have known those who held that such questions might well be left to hang in the larder of Philosophy till everything more substantial in its contents had been discussed. I shall be pleased, sir, to gratify your curiosity as to stage matters to the utmost extent of my power.

GAR. Sir, you are most obliging; but after all I fear that it is but little you can do for me in that particular, although, as I am told, you were a frequent playgoer and an ingenious critic. Yet what can description do for the actor? The voice, the tone, the gesture, the quiver of the

lip of sorrow, the sunlit face of mirth, the lightning-flash of the eye from beneath the thunder-laden brow of anger -how can these things be described, Mr. Lewes ?

LEW. Not easily, sir, I own, when the portrayal of them is as vivid as yours. I am not sure, though, I regret to say, that my own poor powers of description are not fully equal to the mimetic gift of some of our modern

actors.

GAR. Believe it not, sir, if I may be so uncivil as to say so-believe it not! Take my word for it, that true dramatic intelligence may learn more from watching the . poorest mime that ever tore a passion to tatters, than from listening to the most watchful critic's description of the noblest actor that ever appeared upon the stage. Even mistakes of which we are eye-witnesses have more instruction than great feats which we know only by report. I mean no disrespect, sir, to your descriptive talent.

LEW. You need not excuse yourself, Mr. Garrick. It should wound no man's vanity to admit that his faculty of expression could not hope to keep step with your powers of observation. But I regret the more, sir, that you are no longer in a position to exercise them upon the performances of the English stage. It has now an actor well worthy of your study.

GAR. An actor, sir?

LEW. Is there ever more than one who, at any given period, engrosses the attention of the town? Even if he be not really unapproachable by any others, as in your case, the world of playgoers will raise him on a pedestal to make him so. In this instance, however, it is fair, I think,

to say that though the artificial exaltation has been effected, it was not required. Whatever we may think of Mr. Irving in the comparison with his great predecessors, he could afford to descend from his pedestal without risk of being jostled by any of his contemporaries. There would be a clear space round him even on level ground.

GAR. I think I have heard mention of the name. But in what respects does he so far surpass his rivals?

LEW. I will note the most important first. He has the power of exciting the most vehement disputes among the most cultivated persons concerning the merit of his impersonations.

GAR. Do you consider that so clear a mark of superiority?

LEW. Surely yes, sir, for intelligent people will never argue warmly about anything which does not interest them deeply. And deeply to interest such people in a dramatic performance, implies of necessity that the actor must have attempted the impersonation of characters which are of general interest to the intelligent, and that his conceptions of them must have been strikingly imagined and skilfully executed.

GAR. Do you, then, find these qualities in his impersonation of the characters of Shakespeare? for that I think is the truest test.

LEW. In these especially. I say this with peculiar impartiality, because many of his renderings of Shakespeare I confess are not to my taste. But I must confess also that in none of them has Mr. Irving's conception offended me, either on the one hand by the mechanical