and Othello, and Lear, and
crook-backed Richard, and Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, and numbers more,
and demand entrance along with him, shadows to which he alone lends
bodily substance! 'The graves yawn and render up their dead to push us
from our stools.' There is a mighty bustle at the door, a gibbering and
squeaking in the lobbies. An actor's retinue is imperial, it presses
upon the imagination too much, and he should therefore slide unnoticed
into the pit. Authors, who are in a manner his makers and masters, sit
there contented--why should not he? 'He is used to show himself.' That,
then, is the very reason he should conceal his person at other times. A
habit of ostentation should not be reduced to a principle. If I had
seen the late Gentleman Lewis fluttering in a prominent situation in the
boxes, I should have been puzzled whether to think of him as the Copper
Captain, or as Bobadil, or Ranger, or Young Rapid, or Lord Foppington,
or fifty other whimsical characters; then I should have got Munden and
Quick and a parcel more of them in my head, till 'my brain would have
been like a smoke-jack': I should not have known what to make of it;
but if I had seen him in the pit, I should merely have eyed him with
respectful curiosity, and have told every one that that was Gentleman
Lewis. We should have concluded from the circumstance that he was a
modest, sensible man: we all knew beforehand that he could show off
whenever he pleased!

There is one class of performers that I think is quite exempt from the
foregoing reasoning, I mean _retired actors._ Come when they will and
where they will, they are welcome to their old friends. They have as
good a right to sit in the boxes as children at the holidays. But they
do not, somehow, come often. It is but a melancholy recollection with
them:--

Then sweet,
Now sad to think on!

Mrs. Garrick still goes often, and hears the applause of her husband
over again in the shouts of the pit. Had Mrs. Pritchard or Mrs. Clive
been living, I am afraid we should have seen little of them-it would
have been too _home_ a feeling with them. Mrs. Siddons seldom if ever
goes, and yet she is almost the only thing left worth seeing there. She
need not stay away on account of any theory that I can form. She is out
of the pale of all theories, and annihilates all rules. Wherever she
sits there is grace and grandeur, there is tragedy personified. Her
seat is the undivided throne of the Tragic Muse