ae a | [Fes. 
FULL LENGTHS: N® XII. 
Tur AcrTor. 
Pernars Fortune does not buffet any set of beings with more indus- 
try, and withal less effect, than Actors. There may be something in 
the habitual mutability of their feelings that evades the blow ; they live, 
in a great measure, out of this dull sphere, “ which men call earth ;” 
they assume the dress, the tone, the gait of emperors, kings, nobles; 
the world slides, and they mark it not. The Actor leaves his home, and 
forgets every domestic exigence in the temporary government of a state, 
or overthrow of a tyrant; he is completely out of the real world until 
the dropping of the curtain. The time likewise not spent on the stage is 
passed in preparation for the night ; and thus the shafts of fate glance 
from our Actor like swan-shot from an elephant. If struck at all, the 
barb must pierce the bones, and quiver in the marrow. 
Let us instance an author who, by the aid of pen, ink, and paper— 
implements for immortality—makes him a world of his own, peoples it 
according to his desires, and lies basking beneath the sky of summer- 
blue. Let us take Milton, in his divine phrenzy, drawing “ empyreal 
air ;” let us contemplate him suddenly snatched from the heaven of 
heavens by a shrill warning from his landlady, that an unpoetie cob- 
bler refuses to leave the newly heel-tapped shoes of “ Mr. Milton” 
without the groat! Is not this a check? Isnot our poet brought from 
his Pegasus with a jolt that threatens dislocation? We take it, the 
feeling of an Actor, really awakened to worldly pressure, is, in some ° 
degree, the same. He descends from his throne, and the breath of 
assumed royalty is scarcely extinct within him, ere “ our anointed self” 
may receive a no very ceremonious deputation from a petty creditor, or 
the personal attack of an enraged “ cleanser of soiled linen.” 
Our Actor—mind, we are speaking of players in the mass—is the 
most joyous, careless, superficial flutterer in existence. He knows every 
thing, yet has learned nothing ; he has played at ducks and drakes over 
every rivulet of information, yet never plunged inch-deep into any thing 
beyond a play-book, or Joe Miller’s jests. If he venture a scrap of 
Latin, be sure there is among his luggage a dictionary of quotations ; if 
he speak of history,—why, he has played in Richard and Coriolanus. 
The stage is with him the fixed orb around which the whole world 
revolves ; there is nothing worthy of a moment’s devotion one hundred 
yards from the green-room. It is amusing to perceive how blind, how 
dead, is our real Actor to the stir and turmoil of politics ; he will turn 
from a Salamanca to admire a Sir John Brute’s wig ; Waterloo sinks into 
insignificance before the amber-headed cane of a Sir Peter Teazle. 
What is St. Stephen’s to him—what the memory of Burke and Chatham? 
To be sure, Sheridan is well remembered ; but then Sheridan wrote the 
Critic. 
Our Actor is completely great-coated in self-importance—buttoned up 
to the throat in the impervious inch-thick vest of vanity. We never find 
his nature cold and shivering at the atmosphere of diffidence ; no, it 
glows with all the comfortable fervour of self-opinion. Place him any 
where, and it is impossible that he should become frozen ; every Actor 
is, in fact, his own Vesuvius. In Mallim’s South Wales, there is a fine 
characteristic anecdote of the vanity of a dreamy Methodist: the man 
had come to so settled an opinion of his immaculate state, that he planted 
a 
