riticism is
the most tormenting. I would go fifty miles on foot, for I have not
a horse worth riding on, to kiss the hand of that man who will give
up the reins of his imagination into his author's hands,--be
pleased he knows not why and cares not wherefore."_

TRISTRAM SHANDY.

SHADOWS OF THE STAGE.

I.

THE GOOD OLD TIMES.

It is recorded of John Lowin, an actor contemporary with Shakespeare and
associated with several of Shakespeare's greater characters (his range
was so wide, indeed, that it included Falstaff, Henry the Eighth, and
Hamlet), that, having survived the halcyon days of "Eliza and our James"
and lingered into the drab and russet period of the Puritans, when all
the theatres in the British islands were suppressed, he became poor and
presently kept a tavern, at Brentford, called The Three Pigeons. Lowin
was born in 1576 and he died in 1654--his grave being in London, in the
churchyard of St. Martin-in-the-Fields--so that, obviously, he was one
of the veterans of the stage. He was in his seventy-eighth year when he
passed away--wherefore in his last days he must have been "a mine of
memories." He could talk of the stirring times of Leicester, Drake,
Essex, and Raleigh. He could remember, as an event of his boyhood, the
execution of Queen Mary Stuart, and possibly he could describe, as an
eye-witness, the splendid funeral procession of Sir Philip Sidney. He
could recall the death of Queen Elizabeth; the advent of Scottish James;
the ruffling, brilliant, dissolute, audacious Duke of Buckingham; the
impeachment and disgrace of Francis Bacon; the production of the great
plays of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson; the meetings of the wits and poets
at the Apollo and the Mermaid. He might have personally known Robert
Herrick--that loveliest of the wild song-birds of that golden age. He
might have been present at the burial of Edmund Spenser, in Westminster
Abbey--when the poet brothers of the author of _The Faerie Queene_ cast
into his grave their manuscript elegies and the pens with which those
laments had been written. He had acted Hamlet,--perhaps in the author's
presence. He had seen the burning of the old Globe Theatre. He had been,
in the early days of Charles the First, the chief and distinguished
Falstaff of the time. He had lived under the rule of three successive
princes; had deplored the sanguinary fate of the martyr-king (for the
actors were almost always royalists); h