impressed their contemporaries? Very rarely the measured recitation of
this or that speech, but very often a simple exclamation that deeply
moved their auditors, because it was a gleam of nature in the midst
of declamation. The "Prithee, undo this button!" of Garrick, was
remembered when many stately utterances were forgotten. In our day the
contrast between artificial declamation and the accents of nature is
less marked, because its delivery is more uniformly simple, and an
actor who lapses from a natural into a false tone is sure to find
that his hold upon his audience is proportionately weakened. But the
revolution which Garrick accomplished may be imagined from the story
told by Boswell. Dr. Johnson was discussing plays and players with
Mrs. Siddons, and he said: "Garrick, madam, was no declaimer; there
was not one of his own scene-shifters who could not have spoken 'To be
or not to be' better than he did; yet he was the only actor I ever saw
whom I could call a master, both in tragedy and comedy, though I
liked him best in comedy. A true conception of character and natural
expression of it were his distinguished excellences."

To be natural on the stage is most difficult, and yet a grain of
nature is worth a bushel of artifice. But you may say--what is nature?
I quoted just now Shakespeare's definition of the actor's art. After
the exhortation to hold the mirror up to nature, he adds the pregnant
warning: "This overdone or come tardy off, though it make the
unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve, the censure of
which one must in your allowance o'erweigh a whole theatre of others."
Nature may be overdone by triviality in conditions that demand
exaltation; for instance, Hamlet's first address to the Ghost lifts
his disposition to an altitude far beyond the ordinary reaches of our
souls, and his manner of speech should be adapted to this sentiment.
But such exaltation of utterance is wholly out of place in the purely