enough to drive the words out of the head of Jones. Then Jones, who has practised several scenes with Brown (on the stage an "old man," but in private life an airy, dressy gentleman of thirty summers), finds himself called upon to speak his words, not to the dressy Brown, but to a white-headed and generally venerable ecclesiastic, in gold spectacles and knee-breeches—that is to say. Brown, the Archbishop. These surprises (for to a nervous man they are surprises) are enough to unhinge Jones altogether. He makes a mess of his part for a night or two, picks up again after that, and in a fortnight is the talk of the town. Now, if Jones had had an opportunity of rehearsing with Brown the Archbishop, instead of with Brown the Swell, and if he had rehearsed his scenes in the Archbishop's library and not on the empty stage, Jones might have become the talk of the town from the first. In first class French theatres this system is adopted. Parts are distributed, learnt perfectly, and then rehearsed for six weeks or two months, sometimes for three or four months. Scene rehearsals and dress rehearsals occupy the last week of preparations. Actors and actresses act at rehearsal: they have been taught and required to do so from the first, and the consequence is that a bad actor becomes a reasonably good actor, and a reasonably good actor becomes an admirable actor by sheer dint of the microscopic investigation that his acting receives from the stage-manager and from the author. And until this system is in force in England; until the necessity for longer periods of preparation for rehearsals that are rehearsals in fact and not merely in name—
