e low depths of contemporary burlesque, which had degenerated from the
graceful extravaganza of J. R. Planche into witless and tasteless
emptiness.

Curiously enough, it was at this point that something like real
originality--discovering a new sub-species of its own--first began, with
the aid of a sister-art, to renovate the English popular comic stage. At
the beginning of the 19th century the greatest tragic actress of the
English theatre, Mrs Siddons, had passed her prime; and before its
second decade had closed, not only she (1812) but her brother John
Kemble (1817), the representative of a grand style of acting which later
generations might conceivably find overpowering, had withdrawn from the
boards. Mrs Siddons was soon followed into retirement by her successor
Miss O'Neill (1819); while Kemble's brilliant later rival, Edmund Kean,
an actor the intuitions of whose genius seem to have supplied, so far as
intuition ever can supply, the absence of a consecutive self-culture,
remained on the stage till his death in 1833. Young, Macready, and
others handed down some of the traditions of the older school of acting
to the very few artists who remained to suggest its semblance to a later
generation. Even these--among them S. Phelps, whose special merit it was
to present to a later age, accustomed to elaborate theatrical
environments, dramatic masterpieces as dependent upon themselves and
adequate interpretation; and the foremost English actress of the earlier
Victorian age, Helen Faucit (Lady Martin)--were unable to leave a school
of acting behind them. Still less was this possible to Charles Kean the
younger, with whom the decorative production of Shakespearian plays
really had its beginning; or even to Sir Henry Irving, an actor of
genius, but also an irrepressible and almost eccentric theatrical
personality, whose great service to the English drama was his faith in
its masterpieces. The comic stage was fortunate in an ampler
aftergrowth, from generation to generation, of the successors of the old
actors who live for us all in the reminiscences of Charles Lamb; nor
were the links suddenly snapped which bound the humours of the present
to those of the past. In the first decade of the 20th century a
generation still survived which could recall, with many other similar
joys, the brilliant levity of Charles Mathews the younger; the not less
irresistible stolidity of J. B. Buckstone; the solemn fooling of H.
Compton (1805-18