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    known to many , no one is entirely destitute of this faculty . All are at liberty to express liking or disliking for an actor ; but let no one who has not repeatedly and freely exercised this faculty , suppose he is a judge of an actor ' s powers . In him , of this fourth class , the currents of thought course through the veins ; the impressions which his mind receives will , if he ' choose they should , cast over his exterior the variations , the colourings , the

    lights and shadows of a possessed and embodied sense , a reality . Exciting , at volition , the impulses of his imagination , the aspirations , feelings , passions , and characteristics of another , take life and action in his own frame , spread through the intricate mazes , the stems , branches , and fibres of his physical organization , and he holds a second existence within his own—his first ; and he

    can throw it off , or take it on , at will . He is endowed , let me say in parenthesis , with the moral , intellectual , and physical organization , that make the fountain source from which alone an actor ' s efficiencies of beauty , power , and excellence can emanate ; the centre from which all his art radiates , and round which his

    glory revolves . Yet there have been hundreds of the profession who were ignorant of this truth , who knew not of its existence , nor dreamed that it was indispensable in their art ; and some who have stood aloft in the public gaze , and been worshipped as wonders , who never displayed an atom of such organization ; never exercised it themselves , and could not comprehend how it existed in others : but they passed with the world as great actors ; professors thev were , if you please , reader . I have said this

    distinguishing faculty is by the fourth class called into operation at will . So in the actor ' s moments of highest excitement , in the reeling and convulsions of suffering , when mind and frame both seem wrenched nnd torn by conflicting and distracting throes of agony ; it is then that the intellectual senses are more rapid and acute in their action ; it is then that he has the most perfect control over his powers ; 1 mean this of the true actor ; for every

    Junction of mind is gathered in and concentrated to the office for which he would employ them ; and , in opposition to the general belief , I venture to assert that this true actor is at such moments more vigorously sensible , more minutely perceptible of the points of skill which his imagination and impulses have tasked to the execution of the scene , than at other times and moments in which there is little appearance of excitement ; that is to say , when his ' madness' rages highest he is most rational , ( for such things are < madness * to dull-brained fools . ) TTiis may seem paradoxical ; but it may be explained in a knowledge of that volition of double existence of which I have spoken . To proceed—of this fourth class of readers of Shakspeare ' s dramas ; to one of these the completest results of the labours of otherways combined skill , the display of all that ever was waved forth from the hand of a Stanfield , a Grieve , or a Roberts , or from their united mastery of

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    Readers of Shakspeare . 113

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Feb. 2, 1834, page 113, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2630/page/29/