"If the world be, indeed, as 'twas said, but a stage,
The dress only is changed 'twixt the acts of an age.
From the dark tiring-chamber behind straight reissue
With new masks the old mummers; the very same tissue
Of passionate antics that move through the play,

With new parts to fulfil and new phrases to say.”

An old Greek writer, speaking of Alexander of Phere, who reigned in Thessaly only ten months, and then was slain, calls him, in derision of his brief lease of power, a theatrical tyrant, a mere stage king, who, as it were, walked on only to walk off again. But the palace of the Cæsars, Plutarch remarks, received four emperors in a less space of time, one entering, and another making his exit, as if to fret and strut each his little hour upon the stage. How soon the stage directions, Enter Galba, enter and exit Otho, enter and exit Vitellius, lapse in Exeunt omnes!

In Charles the Sixth's ordinance, authorising the players of the "Mysteries of the Passion" (towards the close of the fourteenth century), that poor crazed monarch styles them his "loved and dear co-mates." And what could be juster? Michelet asks. "A hapless actor himself, a poor player in the grand historic mystery, he went to see his 'co-mates '-saints, angels, and devils, perform their miserable travestie of the Passion. He was not only spectator; he was spectacle as well. His people went to see in him the Passion of royalty."

Players, the abstract and brief chronicles of the time, Hazlitt calls the motley representatives of human nature. They are the only honest hypocrites, he says (and hypocrite, by the way, is classically a correct name for them, though Hazlitt may not have remembered or meant it): their life is a voluntary dream, a studied madness-it being the height of their ambition to be "beside themselves :"-to-day kings, to-morrow beggars, it is only when they are themselves that they are nothing: made up of mimic laughter and tears, they wear the livery of other men's fortunes, till their very thoughts are not their own. "They are, as it were, train-bearers in the pageant of life, and hold a glass up to humanity, frailer than itself. We see ourselves at second-hand in them. The stage is an epitome, a bettered likeness of the world, with the dull part left out: and

indeed, with this omission, it is nearly big enough to hold all the rest."

Sir Thomas Overbury had, two centuries before, written characteristically to the same purport. "All men have beene of his occupation," writes the ill-starred knight of a good actor; "and indeed, what hee doth fainedly, that doe others essentially this day one plays a monarch, the next a private person. Here one acts a tyrant, on the morrow an exile: a parasite this man to-night, to-morrow a precisian,” and so of divers others.

:

"And why not players strut in courtiers' clothes?

For these are actors, too, as well as those."

Or, to top (Pope) Alexander the Great with Glorious John (Dryden):

"Even kings but play, and when their part is done,

Some other, worse or better, mount the throne."

As we cannot be monarchs, says the Porpora of fiction, we are artists, and have a kingdom of our own: we dress ourselves as kings and great men, we ascend the stage, we seat ourselves upon a fictitious throne, we play a farce, we are actors. The world, he continues, sees us, but understands us not. "It is only when I am at the theatre that I see clearly our true relations to society. The spirit of music unseals my eyes, and I see behind the footlights a true court, real heroes, lofty inspirations; while the wretched dolts who flaunt in the boxes upon velvet couches are the real actors. In truth, the world is a comedy; and we must play our parts in it with gravity and decorum, though conscious of the hollow pageant which compasses us on every side." And Godolphin pronounces life to differ from the play only in this—that it has no plot, all being vague, desultory, unconnected, till the curtain drops with the mystery unsolved.

All this is in Mr. Carlyle's vein-of the Sartor Resartus date at least; or as when he depicted the family vagaries of Mirabeaudom, which produced "such astonishing comico-tragical French farces"-with the eight chaotic volumes of family correspondence, wherein the various personages speak their

dialogue, unfold their farce-tragedy: "Seen or half seen, it is a stage; as the whole world is. What with personages, what with destinies, no stranger house-drama [than that of the Mirabeau family] was enacting on the earth at that time." The same figure Mr. Carlyle elsewhere applies to our own revolution times, in the century before: "Such is the drama of life, seen in Baillie of Kilwinning; a thing of multifarious tragic and epic meanings, then as now. A many-voiced tragedy and epos, yet with broad-based comic and grotesque accompaniments, done by actors not in buskins;—ever replete with elements of guilt and remorse, of pity, instruction, and fear."

ACT WELL YOUR PART :—there all the moral lies. Though the world be histrionical, and most men live ironically, says Sir Thomas Browne, "yet be thou what thou singly art, and personate only thyself."

It has been sadly and severely said of the Emperor Augustus, who was loved by no one, that if, at the moment of his death, he desired his friends to dismiss him from this world by the common expression of scenical applause (vos plaudite!), in that valedictory injunction he expressed inadvertently the true value of his own long life, which, in strict candour, may be pronounced one continued series of histrionic efforts, and of excellent acting, adapted to selfish ends.

L'honnête homme, writes an epigrammatic thinker, joue son rôle le mieux qu'il peut sans songer à la galerie.

Remember, says Epictetus, so to act your part upon this stage as to be approved by the master, whether it be a short or a long one that he has given you to perform. If he will have you to represent a beggar, endeavour to act the beggar's part well; and so, a cripple, a prince, or a plebeian. It is your part to perform well what you represent: it is his to choose what that shall be.

Thus spake the stoic philosopher. And how speaks the Christian divine? As the merit of an actor, says Robert Hall, is not estimated by the part which he performs, but solely by the truth and propriety of his representation, and the peasant is

often applauded where the monarch is hissed; so when the great drama of life is concluded, He who allots its scenes and determines its period will take an account of His servants, and assign to each his due, in his own proper character.

Since the life of man is likened to a scene, "I had rather," writes John Milton, "that all my entrances and exits might mix with such persons only whose worth erects them and their actions to a grave and tragic deportment, and not to have to do with clowns and vices."

And this, lest such a player have to echo, in spirit, if not to the letter, the bitter conviction of blinded, blundering Leontes --Io anche

"And I

Play too; but so disgraced a part, whose issue
Will hiss me to my grave."

The measure of a happy life, writes Lord Shaftesbury—he of the "Characteristics ". -is not from the fewer or more suns we behold, the fewer or more breaths we draw, or meals we repeat; but from the having once lived well, acted our part handsomely, and made our exit cheerfully-or, to print it as he wrote it, for the lovers of old books' sake-" and made our Exit cheerfully, and as became us."

It is well remarked by Archbishop Trench that we have forfeited the full force of the statement, "God is no respecter of persons," from the fact that "person" does not mean for us now all that it once meant. "Person," from "persona," the mask constantly worn by the actor of antiquity, is by natural transfer the part or rôle in the play which each sustains, as πρόσωπον is in Greek. "In the great tragi-comedy of life each sustains a 'person;' one that of a king, another that of a hind; one must play Dives, another Lazarus. This 'person' God, for whom the question is not what 'person' each sustains, but how he sustains it, does not regard."

PHARAOH'S ALTERNATIONS OF AMENDMENT AND RELAPSE.

H

EXODUS vii.-x., passim.

IS land of Egypt covered with frogs, Pharaoh was urgent with Moses and Aaron to "intreat the Lord" for him, and with conciliatory proposals in favour of the children of Israel. The plague of the frogs abated accordingly, Pharaoh hardened his heart as soon as he saw that there was respite. So with the plague of flies that came in grievous swarms into the house of Pharaoh, and into his servants' houses, and into all the land of Egypt, so that the land was corrupted by reason of the flies; again Pharaoh besought Hebrew intercession, and pledged himself to acts of clemency; and again no sooner was the plague removed, than Pharaoh hardened his heart at that time also, neither would he let the people go. Plague after plague ensued the murrain of beasts, the plague of boils and blains, and the plague of hail and fire; and so grievous was the last-smiting all that was in the field, both man and beast, as well as every herb and tree-that Pharaoh once more importuned Moses and Aaron, confessing his sins, imploring forgiveness, and promising amendment. Once and again he was heard and answered. "And when Pharaoh saw that the rain and the hail and the thunders were ceased, he sinned yet more, and hardened his heart neither would he let the children of Israel go." The plague of locusts, destroying all that the hail had left, made him call for the Hebrew brothers again in hottest haste, entreating forgiveness "only this once," and deliverance "from this death only." But the mighty west wind that swept away the ravagers had no sooner ceased to blow, than the hardening process again set in, and the tyrant revelled as of yore in his accustomed tyranny. How many more plagues might have been added to the ten-decade upon decade-with the like result, each facile amendment merging in a more and more facile relapse, it is superfluous to guess.

We read in Homer, as versified by Pope, that

"The weakest atheist-wretch all heaven defies,

But shrinks and shudders when the thunder flies."