The Hamlets of the Stage: Part Ii

THE next lineal Prince of Denmark was Edmund Kean. One is almost forced to write “ Poor Kean ! ” There is something in him which touches the imagination and kindles sympathy in spite of all his faults. Indeed his faults are all extenuated when we get glimpses of his unhappy organization and his painful life.

He never knew who was his father. Even the identity of his mother was a subject of doubt with him in later years. But he called Nance Carey mother, in his infancy, and she dragged him about with her while she played in low booths at country fairs or in obscure theatres, and when not thus employed hawked gloves and patches and perfumes at the doors of rich houses. When she got sick of him, and cruelly neglected him, at the tender age of two years, kind Miss Tidswell, who had also been an actress, took him in and nursed and succored him. What motive she had except humanity we cannot divine. Even Kean wondered at her kindness in after life, and asked pathetically, “ If she was not my mother, why was she so good to me?”

Before she took charge of him he had been so ill used that his legs were horribly crooked and deformed. She had them put into iron bandages, which he wore day and night. This was kindly meant, but it doubtless cramped his growth and helped to render him the dwarfish figure he was, for he had the head and shoulders of an Apollo. His benefactress taught him to act, tying him to the bedpost while a mere infant, and making him repeat after her the speeches of Hamlet till the words were fixed in his memory! Her training all seems to have tended to naturalness of speech and action. Before repeating the passage, “ Alas, poor Yorick ! ” she bade the little fellow remember her uncle who had lost a leg, and repeat, “ Alas, poor uncle ! ” till he had wrought himself up to the proper pitch of sympathetic pity.

He early frequented the play-houses. Almost before he could walk he appeared on the London stage as Cupid in the opera of Cymon. Even then his wild black eyes and strange beauty attracted admiration. Before he was twelve he played other parts, and figured among the infant imps whom John Kemble introduced around the witches’ caldron in Macbeth. There his love of mischief induced him to trip up the heels of his companions so that they rolled on the stage, in a heap, amid the laughter of the audience. When Kemble, in his dignified way, reproved him, Kean penitently begged the manager to consider that he had never appeared in tragedy before !

After Nance Carey heard that the boy was beginning to be worth something, she appeared to claim him. Again he followed her about, acting a little, while she sold her wares from her pedler’s basket. One day they stopped at a Mrs. Clarke’s. Hearing from a servant of the clever little son of the pedler-woman, who could act like Garrick or Kemble or any one you chose, Mrs. Clarke had him brought upstairs that she might see him. The ragged boy, with his Italian face, his dark liquid eyes, and clustering, unkempt hair, touched her fancy. “ What can you act ?” she asked. “ Anything, madam, — Richard III., Hamlet, Shylock, Harlequin, whatever you like.” Interested still more, Mrs. Clarke arranged a little entertainment for that evening, and asked some friends to see him. She draped a portion of her drawing-room with curtains and made a mimic stage. At the appointed hour the boy came in his rags, for he had no theatrical wardrobe. Mrs. Clarke found a cloak to cover him, a short sword, a laced handkerchief to tuck in his bosom for a frill, and an old hat with a long feather. Thus bravely attired, he went before the company, excited but full of courage. He gave them Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard. Then he tumbled as Harlequin, and mimicked as Bayes. Never had they seen such a juvenile prodigy.

From this time Mrs. Clarke made him her protégé and he remained with her for two years, learning dancing, fencing, and other accomplishments; but his strolling life had unfitted him for restraint. If he was sent to school, he ran away. The theatre seemed to be his natural home. He played Harlequin with success in many a company of wandering actors. Sometimes he attempted loftier parts, and was engaged at regular theatres in the provinces. During one of these engagements he met Mrs. Siddons. His Young Norval quite astonished that dignified queen of tragedy. “ You played very well, sir, very well,” she said, patting him on the head, though he was then grown to man’s estate; “pity there’s too little of you to do anything.”

Like many men before and since, he suffered keenly from the consciousness of his low stature. He was even more sensitive than little Garrick had been. One night, in a provincial theatre, when he was playing Alexander the Great, a party in the stage-box jeered at him loudly as Alexander the Little. At first he bore it in silence ; but when the taunt was repeated, he strode forward to the box, and glaring on those in it with fierce eyes, said proudly, “Yes, but with a great soul ! ”

Through all his boyhood he kept the name of Carey ; but as one Aaron Kean, a tailor or a carpenter, was supposed to have been his father, he assumed that name on becoming a regular actor, and always bore it afterwards. When he was twenty-one, somewhere in the provinces, he married Mary Chambers, who was a clever actress and proved to be his good angel. Never was a life of more touching devotion than that of Mary Kean. Toilsome marches, made from one theatre to another while fearing she might become a mother before shelter could be reached, hunger to the verge of starvation, fatigue, bitterest poverty, her husband’s unsettled habits, — all were borne with heroism, with tender sympathy in his disappointments, with unwavering belief in the ultimate triumph of his genius.

Through his early career of toil and suffering, he longed for an opportunity to appear on the London boards. Night after night he stood at the wings of Drury Lane, gnawing his finger-nails, gnashing his teeth and muttering, “ O, if they would but give me a chance ! ” as he saw fellows of no ability swaggering and mouthing upon the ground which was forbidden to him.

His chance came. On a bitter, cold night in February, 1814, he appeared as Shylock. More than half a century earlier Macklin had redeemed the character from the buffoonery of Doggett, and won the compliment,

But Kean sought to clothe the part in a dignity and pathos it had never yet worn. At the rehearsal, timid and conservative actors, who clung to stage traditions, stopped him with remonstrances against this or that innovation. No matter how low his heart sank, he wore the face of courage, and at last when some one testily cried, “ It’s all wrong, Mr. Kean, all wrong,” he replied, “It’s as I wish it to be. If I am wrong, the public will set me right.”

The public set his critics right, at once and forever. The audience was thin, and there was depressing silence until he came to the passage where the Jew says,

His point here brought out a burst of applause. From that moment dates a career of unparalleled success, which lasted almost twenty years. Never does Kean’s character appear to such advantage as in his hurrying home that night to his wretched lodgings, as soon as the play was over, to embrace his anxious wife in boyish rapture, and to wake his sleeping son that he might fill the babyhands with the shining guineas he had earned, the first drops of a long golden shower.

His Hamlet was first given in March, a month after his appearance at Drury Lane and while the Hamlet of John Kemble still charmed the town. Already Kean had played Richard and Othello with tremendous effect. His Othello was considered a finer piece of acting than his Hamlet. Indeed the few survivors who still remember him pronounce him the “only Othello of the modern stage.” But Kean did not believe this, and liked to play Hamlet best. He always reserved it for his benefit nights, and then appeared in the afterpiece as Harlequin, — a bill sure to crowd the house.

His Hamlet was the antipode of Kemble’s. If he could be said to conform to any rules of art, his acting was that of the Garrick school, as Kemble’s mayhave resembled that of Betterton. His Hamlet was fiery, spontaneous, passionate, tender. The scene with Ophelia was not only his best, but perhaps the most exquisite ever witnessed. An original feature in it was his mode of parting with her after the last word had been spoken between them. He retired the length of the stage, turned, looked fixedly at her for a moment with unutterable grief and longing, then coming back, he kissed her hand with a sigh of parting and despair, and rushed hastily from her presence.

After the performance of his Hamlet, Mrs. Garrick, then ninety years old, sent for him. She seated him in Garrick’s chair, which she said no one else ever had occupied or ever should occupy, and read him a lecture on acting. It was she who induced him to change his reading of the chamber scene and give Hamlet’s rebuke to the Queen with greater severity. But Kean never played it as well afterwards, and said petulantly he wished the old lady had let him alone. Mrs. Garrick was very good to the Keans, and Mary Kean was always grateful to her ; but naturally enough Edmund never quite relished her habit of measuring his genius by the standard of her lost David.

When he was fairly on the topmost wave of success, of course there were critics enough to carp at him. Some detractor sneered to witty Jack Bannister, who had been playing the Gravedigger to Kean’s Hamlet, “ I hear this little man is a wonderful Harlequin.” “Of that I am certain,” answered Jack, “ for he has leaped over all our heads.”

Alas, that the success so richly deserved, so honestly earned, did not bring fairer fruits ! The bitter seeds which neglect and misery planted in Kean’s early youth had poisoned his better nature. Prosperity, instead of taming and civilizing him, only made him mad. Over his later life—his separation from the wife who had been so faithful to him, his rupture with his son, his reckless habits — charity would fain draw the veil of silence.

Early in 1820 he made his first appearance in this country at the new theatre in Philadelphia. His fame had preceded him, but so had George Frederick Cooke, and for several nights the admiration for that great actor created a few dissenters. They soon succumbed, and, on the fourth night of his engagement, when Kean appeared as Hamlet, his position at the head of his profession was admitted. All our leading towns vied with Philadelphia in enthusiasm, and Kean crowned his popularity in Boston by characterizing the city as “ the literary emporium of the New World.”

But the spoiled child of fortune was soon to be visited with the displeasure of that other spoiled child, the public. Returning to Boston at an unfavorable season of the year, he appeared two nights to thin houses, and on the third, after counting twenty spectators through a loophole in the curtain, he abruptly went to his hotel. The theatre afterward filled up to respectable numbers, and the managers begged him to return, but he declared that he would not play to bare walls, and that he was packing his trunk to leave the town.

It is hardly possible for us to realize how thin-skinned the American public, and especially theatre-goers, were to any fancied insult from an Englishman, one or two generations ago. There are many cases in point,—the national wrath, not only at foolish and unjust books, like those of Mrs. Trollope and Basil Hall (though even they contained much unwelcome truth), but also at such comparatively kind ones as Dickens’s American Notes ; the indignant arraignment of Fanny Kemble for observing that few Americans sat a horse well ; and the bitterness kindled against Macready, in Baltimore, for his alleged remark that he could not get any wood in America fit to make an arrow of for the shootingscene in William Tell. Kean’s foolish caprice in Boston was construed into English contempt for America, and so turned the tide of feeling against him, that there were riotous demonstrations in various places, which drove him from the country.

Just before sailing from New York, he visited Bloomingdale Asylum, as it was his habit to study manifestations of insanity for his great part of Lear. While there he astounded the superintendent by turning double somersaults across the garden, and in his frenzy he would have leaped from the roof of the house if strong arms had not seized him and borne him away.

He erected over the remains of George Frederick Cooke a handsome monument, bearing the inscription : —

It yet stands in St. Paul’s churchyard, at the corner of Vesey Street and Broadway. On his last evening in America, tears streamed from his eyes while he stood before it, listening to the chimes of Trinity, and singing, with great sweetness, ‘‘Those evening bells,” and “ Come over the sea.”

Kean carried back to England, as a most cherished relic, the bones of the forefinger of Cooke’s right hand, — “ that dictatorial finger” which the great actor had used with such wonderful effect. Dr. J. W. Francis had carefully preserved Cooke’s skull. One evening, many years later, when Hamlet was represented at the Park Theatre, through some neglect no skull had been provided for the gravediggers’ scene. A messenger from the manager hastened to Dr. Francis’s office for one ; and Francis furnished the only one in his possession, — that of the veteran actor. Never before or since were the familiar phrases, “ Alas ! poor Yorick,” “ A fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy,” and “ Your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar,” uttered with such literal truth as by the Hamlet of that evening to the skull of the great actor.

Soon after Kean’s return to England, his dissipations, and an intrigue in which he became involved, brought on a series of misfortunes, and finally drove him from the stage. Terribly depressed in health and spirits, and only the wreck of his former self, he revisited the United States in the fall of 1825. His first appearance in New York was prefaced by a pathetic appeal to the hospitality and mercy of the country. Certain of the “unco guid” and some of the hot partisans of Booth attempted to excite a riot; but it is pleasant to remember that New York gave to the unfortunate tragedian a generous and hearty welcome.

Revisiting Boston, he said, in a very humble apology published in all the morning newspapers : “ Acting from the impulse of irritation, I was disrespectful to the Boston public. Calm deliberation convinces me I was wrong. The first step toward the throne of mercy is confession ; the hope, we are taught, forgiveness.” But five years had not cooled the rage of the “literary emporium.” The poor actor was twice pelted from the stage with nuts, cakes, and botttes. He retired to the greenroom and wept like a child. Meanwhile the frenzied mob used brickbats and clubs freely, and destroyed a great deal of property ; and Kean left the city by night to escape the imminent peril.

When Kean appeared in Philadelphia, rotten eggs and other missiles were rained upon the stage ; but there was a strong police force present, and arrangements had been perfected to call out the military, so order was quickly restored. Baltimore mobbed him, and he narrowly escaped tarring and feathering; but the storm soon blew over, and he played in the leading Atlantic cities with great success.

Living admirers of Kean never tire of dwelling upon the wondrous expressiveness of his black, brilliant eyes, his mobile features, the richness, depth, and melancholy of his voice, his passionate, meteor-like transitions, which thrilled the beholders with awe. Dr. Francis, in his “Old New York,” describes him as “the most dexterous harlequin, most graceful fencer, most finished gentleman, most insidious lover, most terrific tragedian. . . . . He had read history, and all concerning Shakespeare was familiar to him, — times, costumes, habits, and the manners of the age.” Shakespeare was so familiar to him, “ that I never knew him to look at the writings of the great poet, save once at King John, for any preparation for the stage.”

He was full of eccentricities, always requiring his servant to pick up and remove with a pair of tongs newspapers which abused him. The Indians of Northern New York made a deep impression upon his susceptible nature ; and, when the Hurons elected him a chief, he declared that even old Drury had never conferred so proud a distinction upon him. Then he surprised his friends by appearing at his New York hotel in the full dress of an Indian warrior, — garments of buckskin decorated with beads and porcupine quills, and with his face streaked with yellow and red, his head decked with eagles’ plumes, long black locks of horse-hair falling upon his shoulders, bracelets on his arms, tomahawk at his belt, and bow and arrows in his hand. He was with difficulty prevailed upon to resume the dress of civilization before returning to Europe.

His heart was full of kindness, not only to early friends and young and struggling actors, but to every suffering and needy human being with whom he came in contact. His generosity was lavish and wasteful. Though his income for nearly fifteen years was ten thousand pounds per annum, he died almost penniless. So susceptible that one glass of wine would overcome him, and so compliant that he could not resist persuasion, though he often tried to run away from it, he was an easy victim to excess. Yet one of his managers testifies that he rarely drank until the labors of the evening were over, and never marred a scene with intoxication. Whenever he had been drinking, the first indication of it appeared in an irresistible tendency to quote Latin.

During the seven remaining years of his life, after his last visit to America, he remained upon the English stage, failing in health and memory until he himself felt that his career was ended. In February, 1833, he was announced as Othello to the lago of his son Charles. The audience received father and son with sympathetic cheers, and the old actor played with something of his ancient fire. But the labors of the third act were too much for him. When, with feeble utterance, he had given the words

he dropped death-stricken into the arms of his son. He lingered a few weeks, tenderly nursed by the wife of his youth, from whom his conduct had long separated him, but who, in answer to his dying appeal, had taken her place by his bedside. He died with a line of some old tragedy upon his lips.

No English actor after him has ever so touched the heart to its most secret fibres. Charles Kean, Charles Kemble, William Charles Macready each in turn, became the favorite Hamlet ; but not one of these had the power, with Kean, “ to send us weeping to our beds.” His son Charles, whom we have lately seen bid farewell to the stage in the trembling accents and with the tottering steps of age, was a severe student, always correct and gentleman-like, but by no means the inheritor of his father’s genius. Charles Kemble visited the United States in 1832, with his daughter Fanny. He was a good actor, both in tragedy and comedy, and his Hamlet was his greatest achievement; but it paled before the memory of Kean, still fresh, and the personation of the elder Booth, then in his prime. Not to him, but to his daughter Fanny, descended the hereditary genius of the family.

William Charles Macready, born in 1793, and long at the head of the English stage, was a conscientious, cold, polished actor of the Kemble school, thoroughly devoted to his art, a close and affectionate student of Shakespeare, always anxious to exalt and purify the drama, and devoting his leisure to the cultivation of letters. He was a stage manager of tact and judgment. His Hamlet was one of his most successful characters, — finished, artistic, scholarly, but frigid and constrained. It was the Hamlet of culture, rather than of genius. Satirists declared that as he crooked his little finger one night, exactly so at the same point would he be found to crook it ten years later.

Despite these artificialisms, his acting was occasionally so natural, both in tone and manner, that performers familiar only with their own parts actually thought he was in conversation with them. Once, during a rehearsal of Virginius, he turned to William Forrest, brother of the tragedian, who was playing Icilius, and asked in the words of his part, “Will you lead Virginia in, or do you wait for me to do it ? ” Forrest politely answered, “ Whichever you please, Mr. Macready,” while the other actors were infinitely amused. On another occasion, in William Tell, his remark to young Wheatley about his shoe being untied was so natural, that even Cowell, an old and experienced manager, said pettishly, “ Don’t keep us here all day, Mr. Macready, about that boy’s shoe, but go on with the rehearsal.” He never received higher compliments.

Macready’s introduction of some original “business” into Hamlet led indirectly to serious consequences. In the scene before the King, where the Prince says to Horatio, “They are coming to the play I must be idle,” all other Hamlets had taken “idle” in the sense of being listless and unoccupied. Macready gave it a much more liberal construction, counterfeiting a foolish youth, skipping across the stage in front of the foot-lights, and switching his handkerchief, which he held by one corner, over his right and left shoulder alternately, until the King asked after his health. Edwin Forrest, on witnessing this novel interpretation in Edinburgh, hissed audibly. It was naturally charged to professional and national jealousy, especially as he himself had been received in London with similar marks of disfavor. But Forrest in a public letter defended himself, alleging that hissing had always been regarded as a legitimate mode of expressing disapprobation, and that he could not refrain when Macready desecrated the scene by introducing a “fancy dance.”

Bitter hostility followed, which involved a good deal of national feeling, and culminated in New York, in May, 1849, in the celebrated Astor Place Riots. On the very first night of Macready’s farewell engagement at the Astor Place Opera House, the riotous demonstrations were sufficient to stop the play. But the next evening, urged by his friends, who promised to preserve order, he essayed to appear again. The police arrangements were so excellent that the rioters were not able to get inside ; and rendered more furious by this, they commenced an attack upon the walls. The Mayor acted with great promptness ; the Riot Act was read, and as the crowd still refused to disperse, several volleys of musketry were fired, killing twenty persons, and wounding twice as many more. This harsh but wholesome medicine probably ended forever dramatic riots in New York City.

Macready’s name completes the list of English actors who have won signal fame as the Prince of Denmark.

Hamlet was first given on this continent at the New York Theatre, in January, 1786, by Hallam, “ the father of the American stage,” the first manager of the first theatre in this country. It was received with the close attention and frequent applause which any tolerable representation of it always insures. The play soon grew popular everywhere. For several of the last years of that century, Cooper, an Englishman by birth, but American by adoption, was universally recognized as the best Hamlet in the country. Then came John Howard Payne, who, while starving in a Paris garret, wrote the song of " Home, Sweet Home,” which preserves his name from oblivion. He was a man of singular beauty, and must have looked the part. We only know that he drew crowds to witness it in Europe and this country.

Next comes Junius Brutus Booth, the most gifted man, the ripest scholar, and the greatest tragedian—with the possible exception of Kean — in the whole history of the English-speaking stage.

Booth was born in London, in 1796. His father, Richard Booth, a devoted lover of liberty, embarked for America during the Revolutionary War, to fight on the side of the Colonies. Taken prisoner and carried back to England, he still held America in the highest veneration, and permitted no one to look at a portrait of Washington, which hung in his drawing-room, save with an uncovered head and a reverential bow. His passion for liberty may be discerned in the fact that he named his two sons Junius Brutus and Algernon Sydney.

Junius Brutus, having laid the foundation of a classical education, left School at sixteen, and tried successively the navy, the law, printing, poetry, painting, and sculpture. If, as Schegel says, the dramatic art is rather a union of all the fine arts than properly a separate art, Booth served a rare apprenticeship to his loved profession. He was barely eighteen when, after so many different essays, he gave himself to that art which was henceforth his mistress, and which found in him a devoted and faithful lover.

Among all the actors whom we have been considering, none ever leaped so suddenly into public favor. Kean and Kemble and Macready had been familiar with the stage from childhood. Garrick had been an amateur in boyhood, and was twenty-seven before he played Hamlet. But Booth, who had never seen a play acted till he was sixteen, at twenty was rivalling Kean on the London stage in the difficult character of Richard III.

At this time Kean was playing at Drury Lane, and Booth at Covent Garden. Dissatisfied with the management at the latter theatre, Booth withdrew from it. Immediately all London rang with praises of the generosity of Kean, who had gone “ in his chariot ” to visit the young actor, and had borne him triumphantly to Drury Lane, where they were to play matched parts. For one night they appeared as Othello and Iago, and divided the applause of the spectators ; but after a few representations, Booth began to see that the king of tragedy had no idea of raising up a rival. It became apparent that he was to be extinguished by playing with Kean an parts of little importance. Angry at having been thus deceived, he refused to fulfil the engagement, which, a mere boy in business matters, he had hastily signed at the instigation of Kean, and the management openly accused him of breach of contract. On Booth’s attempting to play again at Covent Garden, there ensued one of the fiercest and most brutal riots in dramatic history. It nearly drove Booth from the stage, but he held his ground courageously, and succeeded in playing it down. Probably, however, it made London distasteful to him, for when only twenty-four he came to this country, and ever afterwards called himself an American.

In spite of the former triumphs of Cooper, Cooke, and Kean, Booth almost immediately became the favorite of the public. Richard III. was his most famous part. But those who saw his Hamlet, before any decay dimmed his greatness, cannot even at this lapse of time speak of it with the calmness of criticism. It was par excellence the Hamlet of Shakespeare. In it Booth’s wonderful pathos, his fiery bursts of passion, his soliloquies, where each word seemed to drop from his heart rather than from his lips, his veneration for his father’s spirit, his impassioned pleading with his mother, and his manner in the last scene, where the destiny which has led and thwarted all his purposes encompasses him with its deepest melancholy and foreboding, are all familiar to us in description. And every look spoke with such full meaning that the deaf could say of him as of Garrick, His face is a language.” Such was his power of throwing all his soul into a word, that when he uttered the simple exclamation, “Alas,POORghost !” tears often streamed from the eyes of his listeners.

Booth was often accused, especially by English critics, of imitating Kean. The facts that they were gifted by nature with some marked points of resemblance, and that Booth was the younger actor, gave color to this charge. They were both of low stature, with handsome faces, wonderfully expressive eyes, and great mobility of feature. Each, too, was gifted with that intense feeling which enabled him to identify himself completely with the part. The imitation seems to have been nature’s, — not Booth’s.

Booth brought with him to America a lovely wife, who was the mother of his ten children, and who still survives. He bought a large tract of land near Baltimore, and spent his leisure in farming, — a pursuit of which he was extremely fond. Here his liberty-loving father spent his last years, and here Edwin, his son and successor, was born.

On this secluded homestead, among fair fields, plashing waterfalls, and dim woods, Booth and his family led at times an almost Arcadian existence. Every tree was sacredly guarded from the axe, and no animal food was permitted to be eaten there. Indeed Booth’s regard for animal life was one of his most marked characteristics. His heart was so sensitive to pain that he could never bear to see it inflicted, and he was touched by all forms of suffering. “ The earliest recollection I have of my father,” writes his daughter, in her admirable memorial, “ is of seeing him upon his knees before a rough sailor who had asked alms at the door. .... My father brought him into the house, and washed and bandaged his wounds with the tenderest care.”

He loved best to play in the widely differing cities of New Orleans and Boston. Perhaps the one gave him the warm greetings which pleased his ardent nature, and the other the colder intellectual appreciation which gratified his judgment In New Orleans he once personated Orestes¹ in Racine’s play of Andromache, in the original, with a company of French actors. His accent was so pure, and his performance so electrical, that, at the close, the theatre rang with cries of “ Talma ! Talma ! ”

He was a good linguist, speaking several modern languages with fluency, and being conversant with both Hebrew and Arabic. With the Hebrew race he believed himself allied by blood. He often attended their synagogues, talked with Jewish Rabbis in their sacred tongue, and was thoroughly familiar with the Talmud. Indeed all forms of religion awakened in him some response. He admired the Koran, and knew many of its finer passages by heart ; he kept days sacred to colors, ores, and metals ; he astonished many Roman Catholic priests by his intimate knowledge of the mysteries of their faith. Best of all, however, he loved to go to worship in a humble Sailors’ Bethel, where his devout manner and the calm, introverted expression of his countenance reproved all levity or inattention.

His eccentricities were commonly attributed to his periodical excesses in drinking, but the underlying cause was in his organization. Not even Kean illustrated so vividly how nearly great wits to madness are allied. No commonplace judgment can be applied to his exquisitely sensitive nature. Even in his younger days, when his habits were abstemious, he seemed to live in a region of abstraction and ideality, in which phantoms became real to him, and he suffered great mental tortures. In later life he often expressed his desire to retire from the stage and keep a light-house, and indeed he once began negotiations to obtain charge of a lighthouse on Cape Hatteras. His imagination, like Kean’s, was greatly touched by the American Indians, and once, in company with Sam Houston of Texas, he journeyed publicly from Pittsburg to Philadelphia in the full paint and costume of a savage warrior. On the stage he became so wrought up that he fully believed himself the character he personated ; actors often feared to fence and even to play with him. There was a story current twenty years ago that this once provoked a flash of his quick wit. In the last act of Richard III., Ratcliff enters his tent to wake him.

One night in a Southern theatre, when Booth’s manner was unusually wild, the frightened Ratcliff of the occasion gasped out,

then stammered, and in trying to correct himself, twice repeated the mistake. Booth finally drew himself up, and asked with sternest dignity, “Why the devil don’t you crow then ? ” The curtain went down in a tumult of laughter, and no more of Richard was given that night.

In fact, his eccentricities always touched and often passed the verge of sanity. Once, while playing Ludovico in Boston, he faltered, mixed scraps from other plays with his part, and, in the third act, suddenly broke off from the measured lines he was speaking, fell into a soliloquy, began to laugh, and was led from the stage exclaiming, “ I can’t read ; I am a charity boy. Take me to a lunatic asylum.” A few hours later he wandered off and spent two or three nights in the woods before his friends could find him. In 1838, on a vessel bound for Charleston, he .was very melancholy, and often alluded to Conway, the unfortunate actor who, in a fit of depression, had jumped into the sea and drowned himself. When Booth heard that the vessel had reached the place where this tragedy occurred, he said, hurriedly, " I have a message for Conway,” and himself jumped overboard. A boat was lowered and he was rescued. The moment he was seated in it, he observed to the friend who had helped to save him, “ Look out, Tom, you are a heavy man ; if the boat upsets, we shall all be drowned.”

During the later years of his life, his voice was sadly injured, and confined chiefly to the nasal tones, —the result of his having broken the bridge of his nose by some accident, the circumstances of which he never remembered. Still he held undisputed pre-eminence on the stage till his dying day. He played for the last time in New Orleans, — the parts of Sir Edmund Mortimer, and John Lump in the farce of " The Review.” Shortly after, he took passage to Cincinnati while somewhat indisposed, and grew seriously ill on the steamer. There was no physician on board ; and, on account of his natural shrinking from observation, he suffered from neglect. Finally, on the 30th of November, 1852, in his state-room, with no one present but the steward of the vessel, he faintly exclaimed, “ Pray, pray, pray !” and his soul passed away. The Masons of Cincinnati had his body embalmed, and sent it to his Maryland home. There, in a room from which all ornaments except a marble bust of Shakespeare had been taken, lay the great actor for three days, so wonderfully life-like that his friends would not believe it anything more than a trance, until a physician assured them that it was death. Over his quiet restingplace, in the Baltimore Cemetery, his son Edwin has erected a monument.

It is too early now to do justice to his genius. Kean, his only rival, had the advantage of a long career on the London boards at a period when some of the most eminent writers in the language were alive, to analyze his genius and perpetuate his fame. The same is true of Garrick and measurably of Kemble. Of Betterton too, though he is so removed from us by time, we can gather a vivid idea from the descriptions of Cibber, of Steele, and of Addison. But Booth’s greatest triumphs were won in America, when theatrical criticism was little more than ruthless denunciation or indiscriminate panegyric. Rufus Choate, familiar with almost every line of Shakespeare, and a reverential worshipper at his shrine, regarded Booth as incomparably the greatest of tragedians, and on hearing of his death, said sadly, “ There are no more actors.”

Booth reared his family with tender care and devotion. Five of the ten children are now living. The one so tragically connected with our national history was named for the famous John Wilkes, who descended from the same stock. The more minutely we study the character of his father, the stronger our impression grows, that Wilkes Booth inherited a taint of madness. Few paragraphs contain more pathos than the lines written by his sister, Mrs. John S. Clark, in the later months of 1865 : “A calamity without precedent has fallen upon our country! We, of all families secure in domestic love and retirement, are stricken desolate ! The name we would have enwreathed with laurels is dishonored by a son, — ‘ his well-beloved, his bright boy Absalom ! ’ ”

The present generation has seen several Hamlets of considerable and varied merit. We can only mention Edwin Forrest, who esteemed Hamlet one of his greatest characters and usually played it on benefit nights, but who, though the closest student of Shakespeare in America, had little fitness for the part beyond an unusually deep, rich voice ; E. L. Davenport, whose merit as an actor is far beyond his reputation, and who is a much more popular Hamlet in Great Britain than any other American has ever been ; and Barry Sullivan, the English actor, whose desert also outruns his fame, and who, played Hamlet to large houses through the United States. But beyond all rivalry, Edwin Booth has succeeded his father in the rôle of the melancholy prince, and has even excelled him in it. The father, like Burbage, won his greatest triumphs in Richard III. ; but the son, more than any other actor since the time of Shakespeare, has identified his genius and reputation with Hamlet. All the culture of all schools of acting has been brought to bear upon this personation. He has evidently studied carefully the effective points of Garrick, the beautiful readings of Henderson, the intellectual conceptions of Kemble, the inspiration of Kean, and the commanding genius of his own father. Nature, too, has been most gracious to him. True, he lacks the yellow locks of the Dane, but, strangely enough, no eminent Hamlet, except Fechter, has ever played the character in them. But he is neither “fat and scant of breath” like Burbage, plain-featured like Betterton, low of stature like Garrick and Kean, nor weakvoiced like John Kemble. And he adds to all other advantages enthusiasm for his profession and a profound belief in its dignity and worth. Such a Hamlet ought to recall the palmy days of the stage, and animate some modern Ophelia with the genius of Mrs. Cibber or Elizabeth Barry.

There is no room here for a criticism of the Hamlet of Edwin Booth. His face bears marked resemblance to that of his father ; and his acting, though lacking his father’s volcanic and aweinspiring power, has the same rare grace and tenderness and “ electrical swiftness,” the same naturalness, and perhaps a more even, finished, and scholarly beauty.

In a stray number of some magazine printed early in this century, we have read a contemporary account of Miss O’Neill as Mrs. Haller, in which her action is so minutely noted, gesture by gesture, every look described, and the delivery of every sentence so set down, that as complete an idea of the personation is obtained as possibly could be gained by those who did not witness it. Such a record the great actor of every great part ought to receive from some worthy critic of the age that owns him, that posterity may be able to judge at least remotely of his merits.² For at best the triumphs of the stage are evanescent. “ After all,” sighed Choate, when complimented upon his splendid forensic fame, — “ after all, a book is the only immortality.” And what Cibber says of Betterton, the eulogist of every great actor must say in his turn : —

“ Pity it is that the momentary beauties flowing from a harmonious elocution cannot, like those of poetry, be their own record ; that the animated graces of the player can live no longer than the instant breath and motion that presents them, or at best glimmer faintly through the memory of a few surviving spectators. Could how Betterton spoke be as easily known as what he spoke, then might we see the Muse of Shakespeare in her triumph, with all her beauties in their best array, rising into real life and charming the beholder. But alas ! since all this is so far out of the reach of description, how shall I show you Betterton ? ”

It has been the fashion in all ages to cry out at the fallen condition of the stage, and bemoan the decline of the legitimate drama. Johnson sadly pictured it in the prologue he wrote for Garrick, and seemed to anticipate that the revival he witnessed would prove but temporary : —

Doubtless before newspapers, books, reading-rooms, and lyceums were abundant, all classes depended more upon the stage for culture and intellectual recreation than in this age of general intelligence, plentifully diffused. But we are not of those who believe in the decline of the drama. It was held very wonderful that Barry could play Romeo twenty-three nights in one season. Within the present generation, Gustav Emil Devrient played Hamlet in German, in Berlin, for eighty consecutive nights ; and the New York stage has lately seen Edwin Booth in the same character drawing crowded houses for one hundred nights in succession. Is Melpomene dead, or are her laurels withered, when such a thing can be ?