Doran's long
and interesting records of the triumphs of Garrick, and other less
familiar, but in their day hardly less astonishing, players, do not
relieve one of the doubt. Garrick himself, as sometimes happens with
people who have been the subject of much anecdote and other
conversation, here as elsewhere, bears no very distinct figure. One
hardly sees the wood for the trees. On the other hand, the account
of Betterton, "perhaps the greatest of English actors," is
delightfully fresh. That intimate friend of Dryden, Tillatson, Pope,
who executed a copy of the actor's portrait by Kneller which is still
extant, was worthy of their friendship; his career brings out the
best elements in stage life. The stage in these volumes presents
itself indeed not merely [88] as a mirror of life, but as an
illustration of the utmost intensity of life, in the fortunes and
characters of the players. Ups and downs, generosity, dark fates,
the most delicate goodness, have nowhere been more prominent than in
the private existence of those devoted to the public mimicry of men
and women. Contact with the stage, almost throughout its history,
presents itself as a kind of touchstone, to bring out the bizarrerie,
the theatrical tricks and contrasts, of the actual world.
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