time to express
a hope that, as a more liberal, and might I say a wiser, _regime_
allows the members of the University to go to the play, they will not
receive any greater moral injury, or be distracted any more from their
studies, than when they were only allowed the occasional relaxation of
hearing comic songs. Macready once said that "a theatre ought to be
a place of recreation for the sober-minded and intelligent." I trust
that, under whatsoever management the theatre in Oxford may be, it
will always deserve this character.

You must not expect any learned disquisition from me; nor even in the
modified sense in which the word is used among you will I venture to
style what I am going to say to you a lecture. You may, by the way,
have seen a report that I was cast for _four_ lectures; but I assure
you there was no ground for such an alarming rumor; a rumor quite as
alarming to me as it could have been to you. What I do propose is, to
say to you something about four of our greatest actors in the past,
each of whom may be termed the representative of an important period
in the Annals of our National Drama. In turning over the leaves of
a history of the life of Edmund Kean, I came across the following
sentence (the writer is speaking of Edmund Kean as having restored
Nature to the stage): "There seems always to have been this
alternation between the Schools of Nature and Art (if we may so term
them) in the annals of the English Theatre." Now if for _Art_ I may be
allowed to substitute _Artificiality_, which is what the author really
meant, I think that his sentence is an epitome of the history of our
stage; and it struck me at once that I could not select anything more
appropriate--I will not say as a text, for that sounds as if I were
going to deliver a sermon--but as the _motif_, or theme of the remarks
I am about to address to you. The four actors of whom I shall attempt
to tell, you something--Burbage, Betterton, Garrick, and Kean--were
the _four_ greatest champions, in their respective times, on the stage
of Nature in contradistinction to Artificiality.

When we consider the original of the Drama, or perhaps I should say
of the higher class of Drama, we see that the style of acting must
necessarily have been artificial rather than natural. Take the Greek
Tragedy, for instance: the actors, as you know, wore masks, and had to
speak, or rather intone, in a theatre more than half open to the air,
and therefore it was