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In these anecdotes you have the critic mind annoyed by the Box Office success of the actor, and the sane simple woman of the world laying down the maxim ‘the actor who pleases everybody must be a man of merit.’ And when one considers it, must it not necessarily be so? An actor can only appeal to one generation of human beings, and if they do not applaud him and support him, can it be reasonably said he is a great actor? If he plays continually to empty benches, and if he never makes a Box Office success, is it not absurd to say that as an actor he is of any account at all?

So far in the proceedings of my inquest it seemed to me clear that in setting down the Box Office as the only sound test of merit in an actor, my position was indisputable. Of course, there were, and are, Box Offices and Box Offices. Cibber, Quin, Macklin, and Garrick appealed to different audiences from Foote. An actor to-day has a hundred different Box Offices to appeal to, but the point and the only point is, does he succeed with the Box Office he attacks? Moreover, the more Box Offices he succeeds with and the greater the public he can amuse, the better actor he is. Garrick knew this when, in the spirit of a great artist, he said: ‘If you won’t come to Lear and Hamlet I must give you Harlequin,’ and did it with splendid success.