make one think of
Callot and the German [76] "little masters," depicting Garrick and
other famous actors in their favourite scenes.

In the vignettes of the Bear-garden and the Swan Theatre, for instance,
the artist has managed to throw over his minute plate a wonderful air
of pleasantness, a light which, though very delicate, is very
theatrical. The river and its tiny craft, the little gabled houses of
the neighbourhood, with a garden or two dropped in, tell delightfully
in the general effect. They are worthy to rank with Cruikshank's
illustrations of Jack Sheppard and The Tower of London, as mementoes of
the little old smokeless London before the century of Johnson, though
that, too, as Dr. Doran bears witness, knew what fogs could be. Then
there is the Fortune Theatre near Cripplegate, and, most charming of
all, two views--street and river fronts--the Duke's Theatre, Dorset
Garden, in Fleet Street, designed by Wren, decorated by
Gibbons--graceful, naive, dainty, like the work of a very refined
Palladio, working minutely, perhaps more delicately than at Vicenza, in
the already crowded city on the Thames side.

[77] The portraits of actors and other theatrical celebrities range
from Elizabeth, from the melodramatic costumes and faces of the
contemporaries of Shakespeare, to the conventional costumes, the rotund
expression, of the age of the Georges, masking a power of imaginative
impersonation probably unknown in Shakespeare's day. Edward Burbage,
like Shakespeare's own portrait, is, we venture to think, a trifle
stolid. Field--Nathaniel Field, author of The Fatal Dowry, and an
actor of reputation--in his singular costume, and with a face of
perhaps not quite reassuring subtlety, might pass for the original of
those Italian, or Italianized, voluptuaries in sin which pleased the
fancy of Shakespeare's age. Mixed up with many striking, thoroughly
dramatic physiognomies, it must be confessed that some of these
portraits scarcely help at all to explain the power of the players to
whom they belonged. That, perhaps, is what we might naturally expect;
the more, in proportion as the dramatic art is a matter in which many
very subtle and indirect channels to men's sympathy are called into
play. Edward Alleyn, from the portrait preserved at [78] his noble
foundation at Dulwich, like a fine Holbein, figures, in blent strength
and delicacy, as a genial, or perhaps jovial, soul, finding time for
sentiment,--Prynne (include