and without acquiring a stilted delivery. The advice of the old actors
was that you should always pitch your voice so as to be heard by the
back row of the gallery--no easy task to accomplish without offending
the ears of the front of the orchestra. And I should tell you that
this exaggeration applies to everything on the stage. To appear to be
natural, you must in reality be much broader than nature. To act on
the stage as one really would in a room, would be ineffective and
colorless. I never knew an actor who brought the art of elocution to
greater perfection than the late Charles Mathews, whose utterance on
the stage appeared so natural that one was surprised to find when near
him that he was really speaking in a very loud key. There is a great
actor in your own country to whose elocution one always listens with
the utmost enjoyment--I mean Edwin Booth. He has inherited this gift,
I believe, from his famous father, of whom I have heard it said, that
he always insisted on a thorough use of the "instruments"--by which he
meant the teeth--in the formation of words.

An imperfect elocution is apt to degenerate into a monotonous
uniformity of tone. Some wholesome advice on this point we find in the
_Life of Betterton_.

"This stiff uniformity of voice is not only displeasing to the ear,
but disappoints the effect of the discourse on the hearers; first, by
an equal way of speaking, when the pronunciation has everywhere, in
every word and every syllable, the same sound, it must inevitably
render all parts of speech equal, and so put them on a very unjust
level. So that the power of the reasoning part, the lustre and
ornament of the figures, the heart, warmth, and vigor of the
passionate part being expressed all in the same tone, is flat and
insipid, and lost in a supine, or at least unmusical pronunciation. So