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membered also that, owing to the immense size of the theatres, every performer wore a mask in which the features were exaggerated, just as he wore buskins which increased his stature, in order to make his face and figure distinctly visible to the distant rows of the audience. These masks necessarily presented one fixed expression of features; they could not possibly be made to display the variable shades of emotion which a real comedian knows how to throw into his face; nor could the actor, if he was to preserve his identity for the audience, change his mask together with his mood from scene to scene. This difficulty would naturally limit the dramatic author's sphere of invention: he would feel that he had to confine himself to certain recognised generalities of character, such as the mask-moulder could contrive more or less to represent, and that the finer shades of distinction which, in spite of so much that is identical, distinguish man from man, must be left for the descriptive poet, and were outside of the province of the author who worked for the stage. The cold severity of Greek tragedy did not suffer much from this limitation of the actor's resources: the level and stately declamation of the text might be accomplished perhaps as well with a mask (which was even said to increase the volume of sound) as without it. So also, in the Old Comedy of Aristophanes and his contemporaries, the exaggerated style of their humour found apt expression in the broad grotesque which the mask-maker and property-man supplied,—just as they do now in our burlesques and extravaganzas. The delicate play of features and expression which are so essential to the due impersonation of some of the