It was ever thus. Each successive epoch of theatrical history presents the same picturesque image of storied regret--memory incarnated in the veteran, ruefully vaunting the vanished glories of the past. There has always been a time when the stage was finer than it is now. Cibber and Macklin, surviving in the best days of Garrick, Peg Woffington, and Kitty Clive, were always praising the better days of Wilks, Betterton, and Elizabeth Barry. Aged play-goers of the period of Edmund Kean and John Philip Kemble were firmly persuaded that the drama had been buried, never to rise again, with the dust of Garrick and Henderson, beneath the pavement of Westminster Abbey. Less than fifty years ago an American historian of the stage (James Rees, 1845) described it as a wreck, overwhelmed with "gloom and eternal night," above which the genius of the drama was mournfully presiding, in the likeness of an owl. The New York veteran of to-day, although his sad gaze may not penetrate backward quite to the effulgent splendours of the old Park, will sigh for Burton's and the Olympic, and the luminous period of Mrs. Richardson, Mary Taylor, and Tom Hamblin. The Philadelphia veteran gazes back to the golden era of the old Chestnut Street theatre, the epoch of tie-wigs and shoe-buckles, the illustrious times of Wood and Warren, when Fennell, Cooke, Cooper, Wallack, and J.B. Booth were shining names in tragedy, and Jefferson and William Twaits were great comedians, and the beautiful Anne Brunton was the queen of the stage. The Boston veteran speaks proudly of the old Federal and the old Tremont, of Mary Duff, Julia Pelby, Charles Eaton, and Clara Fisher, and is even beginning to gild with reminiscent splendour the first days of the Boston Theatre, when Thomas Barry was manager and Julia Bennett Barrow and Mrs. John Wood contended for the public favour. In a word, the age that has seen Rachel, Seebach, Ristori, Charlotte Cushman, and Adelaide Neilson, the age that sees Ellen Terry, Mary Anderson, Edwin Booth, Joseph Jefferson, Henry Irving, Salvini, Coquelin, Lawrence Barrett, John Gilbert, John S. Clarke, Ada Rehan, James Lewis, Clara Morris, and Richard Mansfield, is a comparatively sterile period--"Too long shut in strait and few, thinly dieted on dew"--which ought to have felt the spell of Cooper and Mary Buff, and known what acting was when Cooke's long forefinger pointed the way, and Dunlap bore the banner, and pretty Mrs. Marshall bewitched the father of his country, and Dowton raised the laugh, and lovely Mrs. Barrett melted the heart, and the roses were "bright by the calm Bendemeer." The present writer, who began theatre-going in earnest over thirty years ago, finds himself full often musing over a dramatic time that still seems brighter than this--when he could exult in the fairy splendour and comic humour of _Aladdin_ and weep over the sorrows of _The Drunkard_, when he was thrilled and frightened by J.B. Booth in _The Apostate_, and could find an ecstasy of pleasure in the loves of Alonzo and Cora and the sublime self-sacrifice of Rolla. Thoughts of such actors as Henry Wallack, George Jordan, John Brougham, John E. Owens, Mary Carr, Mrs. Barrow, and Charlotte Thompson, together in the same theatre, are thoughts of brilliant people and of more than commonly happy displays of talent and beauty. The figures that used to be seen on Wallack's stage, at the house he established upon the wreck of John Brougham's Lyceum, often rise in memory, crowned with a peculiar light. Lester Wallack, in his peerless elegance; Laura Keene, in her spiritual beauty; the quaint, eccentric Walcot; the richly humorous Blake, so noble in his dignity, so firm and fine and easy in his method, so copious in his natural humour; Mary Gannon, sweet, playful, bewitching, irresistible; Mrs. Vernon, as full of character as the tulip is of colour or the hyacinth of grace, and as delicate and refined as an exquisite bit of old china--those actors made a group, the like of which it would be hard to find now. Shall we ever see again such an Othello as Edwin Forrest, or such a Lord Duberly and Cap'n Cuttle as Burton, or such a Dazzle as John Brougham, or such an Affable Hawk as Charles Mathews? Certainly there was a superiority of manner, a tinge of intellectual character, a tone of grace and romance about the old actors, such as is not common in the present; and, making all needful allowance for the illusive glamour that memory casts over the distant and the dim, it yet remains true that the veterans of our day have a certain measure of right upon their side of the question.