Before taking leave of the dolomites it | been led in modern times, and the world is may be useful to refer to the theories con- still glorious with his work. cerning their formation, still a moot question among geologists. The weight of the argument seems to favor the conclusion of Baron Richthofen, that they are the work of coral insects, formed upon the lower rocks at the bed of a deep salt sea, FIRE-PLACE IN ITALIAN INN AT FADALTO. and raised by slow upheaval to their present elevation. He bases his hypothesis upon the correspondence of their forms and their surroundings with what is known concerning the coral reefs of the Pacific, the isolation of their masses from other corresponding formations, the improbability of their peculiar shapes being due to meteoric denudation, the undisturbed beds beneath them and occasionally above them, and the very unequal thickness of the deposit at different points -an inequality in which it would seem that the other rocks in their neighborhood would have shared had it been due to erosive or atmospheric action. We were sleeping at the very Italian Albergo di Cadore, at Tai, ten minutes' walk from Pieve di Cadore, higher up in the hills. There, in a dingy little stone house, now occupied by uncleanly peasants, its floors begrimed with dirt and its ceilings blackened with smoke, the great Venetian, Tiziano Vecellio, four hundred years ago entered upon his illustrious life. A longer life of industrious labor has not We were roused before the first gleam of day. Over the black, fir-clad hills peered the weird moon-lit peaks of the Antelao, Marmarole, Pelmo, and Civita. Against the dark woods the face of the campanile and the scattered house fronts stood white and clear. The river rolled far below us through a dark mysterious cleft, toward which wound the white Ampezzo road. In our day's drive we were to descend nearly three thousand feet. The Piave, down whose valley our course lay, is a very considerable stream, winding through a broad bed of desolate gray stone brought down by the floods, a dismal setting for its beryl-colored waters. It passes many villages built of the stone against whose solid masses they cling. Little fertile land is to be seen, and one wonders how the population, even with its obvious severe labor, subsists. The lumber-driving and the frequent saw-mills employ many men, and the constant rectification of the course of the river and the maintenance of the frequent shoots through which the logs are driven occupy many women with most arduous stone-carrying-in baskets at their backs. Despite their hard life, they seem cheerful and careless and happy. The children gathering manure on the highway and the women with their busy distaffs at the doorways showed little evidence of absolute poverty. Of beggars we saw very few. The children who followed the carriage calling for kreutzers begged from inclination rather than from necessity. Later, near Belluno, we left the swiftflowing Piave, and followed its longabandoned original course through a valley which a great land-slip, possibly in prehistoric times, dammed to a height of six hundred feet, forcing the river to find exit through another gap in the mountains, and turning a part of its old bed into the broad bright blue lake of Santa Croce. The old lower valley of the Piave is fed with only the mountain rills formerly its insignificant branches. Here begins the little brook which, filling the basins of a series of little lakes, grows to a respectable stream by the time it leaves the hills at Serravalle, irrigates the rich meadows of Venetia, and pours into the Adriatic far to the east of the new mouth of the Piave. At the summit of the broad dam stands Fadalto a few houses and the little inn where we dined. It was a memorable inn, tidy in its appointments, and though thoroughly Italian, very passable as to its table. Its kitchen was the most picturesque and the prettiest that we had any where seen. A long room with tables for the commoner guests, with huge whitewashed beams hung with shining utensils of embossed copper, with a latticed screen, behind which the handsome and smiling burns a wood fire open on all sides. Above, a funnel of wood painted black, and as large as the hearth, gathered the smoke to the chimney. From its border there hung a woolen curtain eight inches wide. The sides of the bay under the windows were furnished with a broad high seat, to which the edges of the hearth served as a footstool; under this were the wood-boxes. Enormous polished iron andirons and numerous copper vessels stood upon the hearth, a great black soup kettle hanging from its chain completing the picture. A cozier nook for winter evening gossip could not be desired. Our journey, which had begun at six, led us on through the lowering hills, and finally out on to the fertile plain of Venetia, where the twin towns of Serravalle and Cenada, with their well-planted connecting allée and spacious half-way theatre W THE GRAND DAYS OF HISTRIONICS. WHAT is good acting? To hear this | lived could have excelled, was neglected question warmly discussed in all its during quite ten years of the latter part bearings you should be seated in the com- of his life, simply because the public was fortable greenroom of some metropolitan surfeited with the Shakspearean and legittheatre when the company are gathered imate drama, and turned instinctively, during a performance, waiting to be sum- instead, to bright, crisp, new producmoned to their various entrances by the tions, the outgrowth of contemporaneous call-boy-that Puck of the mimic world thought, the reflex of modern men and --where, among the juvenile ladies, old manners. Nor is this falling off from women, soubrettes, walking gentlemen, the worship of high ideals a reprehensiand utility men of the present day, and ble practice which can be charged upon belonging strictly to their epoch as expo- Americans alone. On the contrary, New nents of the dry-goods drama, the patent- York will stand more Shakspeare than leather-boot tragedy, are to be seen a few London will. aged persons whose theatrical experience dates back to the period when the "legitimate" was in force, and such innovations as sensational dramas, emotional plays, drawing-room comedies, and burlesques were not only unknown, but unlookedfor in the future. These individuals, of course, disdain the modern school of acting, and loudly proclaim that save for such late-lingering lights as Henry Irving and Edwin Booth, the grand days of histrionics came finally to a close with the retirement of Macready, or, at latest, the death of Edwin Forrest. A frequent contention with successful modern actors is that there is no such thing as a standard by which to judge histrionic ability, that acting is all a matter of taste, and that that person whom you like to see act is a good actor. The reasoning is specious, but its logic is not sound. Apply the rule to literature, and see what comes of it. The panderers to the sensational in fiction, purveyors of bad grammar and blood-curdling situations, command a thousand readers where poets whose writings generations of men have agreed to pronounce classic stand ards can boast of a score. Another argument very often put forth by actors is that the stage being always the mirror of the age, the drama of the day suits the taste of the day, and that Mrs. Siddons herself, if she could return and act before us to-morrow, would not be liked. I think there is much likelihood of truth in this supposition. The public has given unmistakable evidences of its weariness of the hackneyed legitimate drama. Edwin Forrest, whose melodious utterance of blank verse I find a difficulty in believing any actor who ever What the stage of the past was we know by the records of its glory and greatness which have come down to us. The masterpieces of literature were written for the stage, and only for the stage; and though as poetry we admire them to-day as much as they ever could have been admired, it is not to the stage we go to listen to them. The stage of the present is a representation of our complex and overluxurious civilization, commonplace from its very comfort, unheroic from its jog-trot domesticity. Now what will the stage of the future be? I predict that its literary character will gradually become even less important than it is at present, and that the coming drama will be panoramic, almost pantomimic. The enormous proportions of modern playhouses, the crowds which nightly resort to them for diversion, not for study, are among numerous other unmistakable indications of the ultimate triumph of the pictorial over the scholastic drama and the poetic tragedy. Meantime, when the dust of oblivion is gathering more and more thickly upon the records of the grand days of histrionics, now forever past, and probably, so far as individual actors are concerned, never again to be revived, let us take a peep between their musty leaves, and with the aid of authentic portraits, painted by the most renowned artists of those days, throw our minds backward over the abyss of time, and try to "figure to ourselves” what manner of people these great players were. The task will not be altogether impossible. How they looked, we can see from the portraits. What the leading events of their lives were, history tells us. The one thing which it is al most impossible for us to guess is what their acting was like. Ungrateful as the profession of the actor in many respects is during his lifetime, it has the additional drawback, in which it stands alone among the artistic avocations, of leaving nothing behind after death as a silent yet ever eloquent witness of greatness. Of all the multitudes of women who have appeared upon the English-speaking stage since the abolition of the custom of making boys personate female parts, there is, perhaps, not one whose memory is invested with so peculiar an interest as Nell Gwynne. Our picture of little Nelly is a copy of a portrait made, of course from life, by Sir Peter Lely. The original painting is the property of the Marquis of Hastings, and a view of it being a favor, I have preferred to present this to my readers instead of the better known, more hackneyed, and far less pleasing one, the property of the Queen. Vol. LIX.-No. 349.-4 Nell's birth-place is a matter of dispute. Wales claims her as a Welsh girl: a house at Hereford is pointed out to tourists as that in which she first saw the light. The royal catalogue at Hampton Court, however, speaks of her as having been born in the Coal Yard, Drury Lane, a poor thoroughfare, still in existence; and in this opinion Mr. Henry Barton Baker (to whose voluminous work entitled Our Old Actors I am much indebted) concurs. She was a neglected waif, and as a mere child was sent to hawk oranges in the pit of Drury Lane, where her pretty ways and bright sayings always attracted a crowd. Her personal popularity among the habitués of the play-house won the attention of the manager, and as a natural transition, by his aid, she passed from in front of the foot-lights to behind them. The old diarist Pepys has left clearer indications of her style of acting than any one else, and his testimony, as well as all. 66 ly. Her stage thereafter was at Windsor Castle, her auditors the court. criticism of her which I have been able | went behind the scenes and asked for Nelto glean, points conclusively to the supposition that Nell Gwynne was an actress much of the Lotta type-a gay, lively little creature, full of dash and spirit in comic parts, but who failed altogether in sentiment, and in heroic tragedy was most abominable. Pepys notes that he was most infinitely displeased with her......in a great and serious part, which she does most basely." Dryden took her measure well, probably, when he wrote the following lines for her to speak after the burlesque "business" of having stabbed herself and then come to life again : "I come, kind gentlemen, strange news to tell ye: London to-day is dotted with monuments, in the shape of hospitals, relief rooms, and other places of succor for the poor, which were founded by the munificence of Nell Gwynne. Naturally the poor people were fond of her, and from all the scorn and rage which were lavished on the licentious court of Charles the Second, little Nelly was ever exempt. Crowned with bay, as indicative, perhaps, of many dramatic victories, holding a manuscript in her hand, from which she may have studied, and with her sumptuous dress held on her shapely neck by a priceless chain of jewels and rare pearls, sits beautiful Anne Oldfield. She went on the stage at sixteen, and though unmarried (she never married), was announced at once as Mrs. Oldfield, it being the custom, previous to the eighteenth century, to so designate both single and married women. But in farcical characters she must have been bewitching. Pepys writes, when speaking of Dryden's play called The Maiden Queen: "There is a comical part done by Nell, which is Florimel, that I The part in which Anne Oldfield took never can hope ever to see the like done London by storm, and one with which again by man or woman. The king and her name must ever be associated in histhe Duke of York were at the play. But trionic annals, was that of Lady Betty so great a performance of a comical part Modish, in Cibber's comedy of The Carewas never, I believe, in the world before less Husband. On reading this now obsoas Nell do this, both as a mad girl, then lete play we discover the real basis of the most and best of all when she comes like a success of the actress who first appeared young gallant, and hath the motions and as Lady Betty. The part itself is most carriage of a spark the most that ever I charming, and as true to nature to-day as saw any man have. It makes me, I con- it was then. Lady Betty is what we now fess, admire her......I kissed her, and so call "a flirt." She is tantalizing, fickle, did my wife; and a mighty pretty soul witty, provoking; but throughout all this she is." she is a dear, amiable, whole-souled, bigTalent so decided and personal attrac-hearted woman, whom to know is to love. tions so marked would win the admiration of any audience, ancient or modern, and Nelly was always devising some new grotesqueness in costume to add to the fun. In one of her parts she came on the stage unexpectedly, wearing a hat as large round as a cart-wheel, and which almost entirely hid her. This was done as a "take-off" on some pastoral play which was being performed at the rival theatre, exactly as in our theatres to-day Lotta burlesques Modjeska. Fatal or fortunate, as one looks at it from the moral or the worldly point of view, was Nelly's famous hat assumption. Her success that night with her enraptured audience exceeded any she had hitherto achieved, yet this was her last appearance upon the stage. When the curtain fell, the king Anne Oldfield's particularly striking beauty, and, above all, her silvery melodious voice, had been much admired on the stage from the very first night of her appearance. No one considered her a great actress, however, or even a very promising one. But the instant she walked on the stage as Lady Betty Modish the world of high society, both court and aristocracy, felt that this was the embodiment of all the graces, dignity, and loveliness of their order. Never had such a woman of fashion been dreamed of on the boards. Ladies of rank went to the theatre to catch the secret of her almost queenly deportment in a character full, nevertheless, of fun and "tease." Seeing her so marvellously well adapted for the impersonation of women of high life, Cibber wrote |