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THE ACTOR.

Perhaps Fortune does not buffet any set of beings with more industry,
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.

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