ad seen the rise of the
Parliament and the downfall of the theatre; and now, under the
Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, he had become the keeper of an humble
wayside inn. It is easy to fancy the old actor sitting in his chair of
state, the monarch of his tap-room, with a flagon of beer, and a
church-warden pipe of tobacco, and holding forth, to a select circle of
cronies, upon the vanished glories of the Elizabethan stage--upon the
days when there were persons in existence really worthy to be called
actors. He could talk of Richard Burbage, the first Romeo; of Armin,
famous in Shakespeare's clowns and fools; of Heminge and Condell, who
edited the First Folio of Shakespeare, which possibly he himself
purchased, fresh from the press; of Joseph Taylor, whom it is said
Shakespeare personally instructed how to play Hamlet, and the
recollection of whose performance enabled Sir William Davenant to impart
to Betterton the example and tradition established by the author--a
model that has lasted to the present day; of Kempe, the original
Dogberry, and of the exuberant, merry Richard Tarleton, after whom that
comic genius had fashioned his artistic method; of Alleyne, who kept the
bear-garden, and who founded the College and Home at Dulwich--where they
still flourish; of Gabriel Spencer, and his duel with Ben Jonson,
wherein he lost his life at the hands of that burly antagonist; of
Marlowe "of the mighty line," and his awful and lamentable
death--stabbed at Deptford by a drunken drawer in a tavern brawl. Very
rich and fine, there can be no doubt, were that veteran actor's
remembrances of "the good old times," and most explicit and downright,
it may surely be believed, was his opinion, freely communicated to the
gossips of The Three Pigeons, that--in the felicitous satirical phrase
of Joseph Jefferson--all the good actors are dead.

It was ever thus. Each successive epoch of theatrical history presents
the same picturesque image of storied regret--memory incarnated in the
veteran, ruefully vaunting the vanished glories of the past. There has
always been a time when the stage was finer than it is now. Cibber and
Macklin, surviving in the best days of Garrick, Peg Woffington, and
Kitty Clive, were always praising the better days of Wilks, Betterton,
and Elizabeth Barry. Aged play-goers of the period of Edmund Kean and
John Philip Kemble were firmly persuaded that the drama had been buried,
never to rise again, with the dust of Garri