us. ances were faultless. He may have been matched by others, and haply surpassed in all secondary histrionic qualities, with the exception of voice; "he holding, beyond rivalry, the single, controlling quality of a penetrating, kindling, shaping imagination." He was, perhaps, "the most unequal of all great actors." To casual observers, therefore, he often seemed to fall short of his great reputation. During the forty years, save one, which bounded his dramatic career, Mr. Booth's habit of life, both on the farm and on the stage, was exemplarily temperate." reverence for the sacredness of all life amounted to a superstition. He abstained for many years, on principle, from the use of animal food. But he was subject to an extravagant and erring spirit allied to madness, which sometimes, induced him to depart from the theatre at the very time fixed for his performance; whereupon the disappointed audience not unnaturally explained his conduct by ascribing it to intoxication. It is confessed, indeed, with grief and pity, that the baser charge was often true, and that the actor sometimes relieved, "by means questionable, pitiful, pardonable," the exhaustion attendant upon his great exertions. Something by way of further apology for the actor might have been urged touching the habits of intemperance which prevailed generally a generation ago-it was not only the actors who drank deep in the days of Edmund Kean. history of the stage, may dispute his su- While thus according to Booth the gift of supreme histrionic power, however, Mr. Gould would not imply that his perform Famous and prosperous as Mr. Booth became in America, it is admitted that he was never "the literary fashion." He arrived in the States unheralded, unknown, unprovided with letters; he was obliged to introduce himself to the manager of the Richmond Theatre, to secure a first appearance upon the American stage. He proceeded to Boston, and there played Octavian in the Mountaineers, to a very poor house. "But the fire took; and the next day the town was ablaze with interest in the new tragedian-an interest that scarcely flagged during the following thirty years." It was his wont to avoid listless and fashionable audiences, "with the blue blood sleeping in their veins," and to play at second-rate theatres, assured of that fulness and heartiness of popular appreciation which he found infinitely preferable to the "cool approval of scholars." - Certain eccentricities he has been credited with, although of these Mr. Gould says no word. It is understood that he was accustomed to play Oronoko with bare Too tender e'en for tenderness to touch; gently, and withal seems to be so thoroughly in earnest, that his book rarely ceases to be interesting, and, indeed, instructive. Hamlet, we learn, was Booth's favourite part, and special mention is made of a performance at the Howard Athenæum, Boston, towards the close of the actor's career. The nobility of his profile had been destroyed by the accidental injuries he had received; but the beauty of his voice, at one time gravely affected by this mischance, was now completely restored. He wore no wig, and his hair had turned to an iron-grey hue; he had no special help from costume or scenery, or from bis fellow - players. The audience was fit though few; but "it was a noteworthy fact, however it might be accounted for, that Mr. Booth invariably seemed to play better to a thin house." And never did the soul of Hamlet shine forth more clearly "with its own peculiar, fitful, far-reaching, saddened, and supernatural life," than on this particular occasion. We do not find, however, that Mr. Booth's Hamlet was very unlike other Hamlets, except in so far as the physical qualities of the actor differed from those of other representatives of the part. Mr. Gould speaks with surprise of the applause awarded to the Hamlet of "that sensible but unimaginative actor Macready," who, in one scene of the play, "seemed to change natures with Osric, the waterfly, and to dance before the footlights flirting a white handkerchief over his head." Mr. Rufus Choate, comparing Kean and Booth in Hamlet, said, "This man (Booth) has finer touches." A strange reading may be noted. Mr. Booth read the line, "With a bare bodkin who would fardels fear," as we have printed it, after an unpunctuated fashion, affirming that "bodkin" was a local term in some parts of England for a padded yoke to support burdens on either side; and that a bare bodkin was a yoke without the pad, and therefore galling. Mr. Gould observes simply, "The meaning assigned has, we believe, escaped the notice of all lexicographers." It is mentioned that in the year 1831 Booth, being the temporary manager of a theatre in Baltimore, supMr. Gould devotes a distinct essay to ported the Hamlet of Mr. Charles Kean each of Booth's impersonations; but we by assuming the part of Lucianus, or may not closely follow the author through-second actor," whose function in the play out his critical labours. He describes the is to deliver the brief speech beginning, feats and accomplishments of his favourite "Thoughts black, hands apt, drugs fit," &c. actor with much minuteness, finding reason Says Mr. Gould: "In Booth's delivery of for applause in almost every particular. these fearful lines, each word dropped Yet he writes so vivaciously, so intelli- poison. The weird music of his voice and the creeping, trembling play of his pale, 66 the the stealthy yet decisive action, made this brief scene the memorable event of the night"—which is not saying much for the Hamlet of Mr. Charles Kean. Booth's conception of the character of Shylock was, it seems, influenced by "the Hebrew blood which, from some remote ancestor, mingled in the current of his life, was evidently traceable in his features, and, haply, determined the family name-Booth, from Beth, Hebrew for house or nest of birds." Booth's mind was deeply exercised by religious problems, by obstinate questionings of futurity and human destiny. "He passed into all religions with a certain humility and humanity, and with a certain Shakesperian impartiality. Among Jews he was counted a Jew. He was as familiar with the Koran as with the Hebrew scriptures, and named a child of his after a wife of Mahomet. At other times, and in sympathy with his favourite poet, Shelley, he delighted to lose himself in the mysticism of the faiths of India." It was Kean's fancy, the reader will remember, to join a tribe of Hurons, to wear the strange dress, including war-paint, of a Red Indian chief, and to assume the striking name of "Alantenaida." uttered the word "pearl," as though it were indeed "the immediate jewel of his soul," his wife, with a lingering fulness and tenderness of emphasis, and with a gesture as if in the act of throwing it away he cast his own life from him. Booth's Iago was not as Kean's, “a gay, light-hearted monster; a careless, cordial, comfortable villain;" so Hazlitt wrote of it. Booth gave quite another version. His conception was saturnine; the expression of it strangely swift and brilliant. "He showed the dense force, the stealth, the velvet-footed grace of the panther; the subtlety, the fascination, the rapid stroke of the fanged serpent. His performances of this part did not vary much. Whatever difference might be discovered arose from the greater or less intensity of the representation." He came on the stage as though "possessed by his most splendid devil." The voice he used was his "most sweet and audible, deep-revolving bass." His delivery of the text was a masterpiece of colloquial style. It had all the abrupt turns, the tones of nature, the unexpectedness, and the occasional persuasive force which belong to the best conversation. His address to Othello had "a fearful symmetry of falsehood." "He lied so like truth, that had we been in Othello's place we felt he would have deceived us, too. Yet was the odiousness of Iago's nature lightened and carried off by the grace and force of Booth's representation." The last scene of Booth's Othello is described as "full of fate." He entered with an Eastern lamp, lighted, in one hand, and a drawn scimitar in the other. "The oriental subjective mood had obtained full possession of him. The supposed 'proofs' had sunk into his mind, and resolved themselves into a fearful unity of thought and". purpose. . . . The expression of constrained energy in his movements-the large, lowtoned, vibrant rumination of his voice, sounding like thought overhead-filled the scene with an atmosphere at once oppressive and fascinating." When he spoke of "the very error of the moon," his gesture seemed to figure the faith of the Chaldean, and to bring the moon "more near the earth than she was wont." "Roderigo killed!' (with wonder), and Cassio killed!' (glutting the words in his throat)." The lines that follow he delivered with burning intensity. His speech over his dead wife seemed the ultimate reach of blended grief and love and wild, remorseful passion of which the human voice is capable. At the summons, "Bring him away!" and as he is beginning his final speech, he took a silken robe, and carelessly threw it over his shoulder; then reached for his turban. possessing himself of a dagger he had concealed therein. He Kean's Macbeth, according to Hazlitt, was deficient in the poetry of the character-he did not look like a man who had encountered the weird sisters." Booth's performance, on the contrary, was "constituted by imagination, kindled and swayed by supernatural agencies." The daggerspeech was given "in volumed whispers-it was filled with fearful shadows." After the murder, when Lady Macbeth was gone to gild the faces of the grooms with Dancan's blood, and Macbeth, left alone, hears a knocking at the door, and delivers the lines beginning "Whence is that knocking?" Booth looked at his hands with starting eyes and a knotted horror in his features, the while he wiped one hand with the other from him with intensest loathing. "The words came like the weary dash on reef rocks, and as over sunken wrecks and drowned men, of the despairing sea.. He launched the mysterious power of his voice, like the sudden rising of a mighty wind from some unknown source, over those multitudinous seas,' and they Booth's voice was a "most miraculous organ; "it transcended music;" it was guided by a method which defied the set rules of elocution: it brought "airs from heaven and blasts from hell;" but it was marked by one significant limitation-it had no mirth-there were tones of light, but none of levity. Yet, now and then, on such occasions as his benefit, Mr. Booth appeared in farce, as Jerry Sneak and Geoffrey Muffincap. But his farce was simply the negation of his tragedy. "The sunny blue eye, the genial smile, the pleasantry we found so winning in social intercourse, never appeared upon the stage." He could not be comic. "His genius, and the voice it swayed, were solely dedicated to tragedy." Garrick danced; Kean danced and sang exquisitely; Booth could neither dance nor sing. A certain comic song he did attempt at times, by way of enlivening his performance in farce; but it was simply "a grotesque jingle, scorning melody, and depending for its success on odd turns of expression, verbal and vocal." He was, in truth, to Mr. Gould's thinking, always the Tragedian. Yet was his art unremovably coupled to nature." The term "theatrical" could never be justly applied to him. "Nature was the deep source of his power, and she imparted her own perpetual freshness to his personations. We could not tire of him any more than we tire of her. His art was, in a high sense, as natural as the bend of Niagara, as the poise and drift of summer clouds, the play of lightning, the play of children, or as the sea, storm-tossed, sunlit, moonlit, or brooded in mysterious calm-and his art awakened in the observer correspond The success of Booth's Lear, as Mr. Gould is enabled to show, dated so far back as his first assumption of the part at Drury-lane in 1820. "We have seen Mr. Booth's Lear, with great pleasure," writes Hazlitt, whom Mr. Gould cites as an unwilling witness, for he went on to say, "Mr. Kean's is a greater pleasure to come, as we anticipate." Yet when Kean did play the part he disappointed his admirer, who even ventured to describe the performance as a failure. Mr. Gould is entitled to infer that Hazlitt preferred the Lear of Booth, and, seeing that Booth's performance came first in order of time, the question as to his imitating Kean, "a question first put by prejudice, and since repeated by dulness," could not be raised in regard to King Lear, at any rate. It is suggested, indeed, that danger arose lest Kean should be charged with imitating Booth, and was thus induced to adopt a certain perverse reading, which Hazlitt has duly noted. It was as Lear, at the National Theatre, Boston, in 1835, that Mr. Gould saw Booth for the first time. "The blue eye, the white beard, the nose in profile, keen as the curve of a falchion, the ringing utterances of the names 'Regan,' 'Goneril,' the close pent-up passion striving for expression, the kingly energy, the affecting recognition of Cordelia in the last act-made a deep impression on our boyish mind." Mr. Goulding emotions." admits that he witnessed with a certain Mr. Gould's book is altogether a curious pleasure Mr. Macready's scholastic performance of Lear-but it did not move him much. "It was marred by the cold premeditation which marked all the efforts of that educated gentleman. Marvellous as was the imitation of the signs of passion, we felt the absence of the pulse of life. He was the intellectual showman of the character, not the character itself. He never got inside. Conception is a blessing not vouchsafed to actors of his school. With Booth, the case was different "-then follows a high-flown account of the achievement of Mr. Gould's favourite actor in the part, concluding with "in a word, the interior life of Lear came forth, and shone in the focal light of Mr. Booth's representation." and interesting memorial of the actor, but it necessarily is an incomplete reply to the. question touching Booth's histrionic merits. To Mr. Gould he was very great indeed; but how far is that conclusive? The honesty of Mr. Gould's convictions is not to be impugned, his book abounds in force and ingenuity; but is his judgment to be trusted? It is possible that Booth, an imitator in his youth, developed originality in his maturity, and really deserved to rank at last among the great actors of his time, as indeed he was ranked generally in America. But, on the other hand, conventionality and plagiarism in dramatic matters were less likely to be recognised in America than in this country. Actors of note had visited the States from time to time before the arrival of Booth; but the American play. goers were scarcely familiar with acting of the highest class-were, perhaps, likely to be content with inferior histrionic displays. In any case, Mr. Gould has done good service to the memory of Booth. He has placed upon record the high estimation in which the actor was held by the American public; for, without doubt, the essayist speaks on behalf of a large majority of his countrymen. And we may deduce from the matter the rather commonplace moral, that unanimity of opinion is a rare thing, in regard to the transactions of the theatre, not less than in relation to other subjects. Even when jurymen agree upon their verdict, it must be understood that oftentimes there has been real sacrifice of preference or conviction: some yielding to coercion for the sake of concord, quiet, and escape from the box. When Kean said, "The pit rose at me," he did not mean, absolutely, that none of the audience kept their seats. Be sure there were dissentients, who did not join in the chorus of enthusiastic applause-who sat unmoved, perhaps unsatisfied, preferring acting of another kind and school, to that exhibited by the new performer. There is always a minority--an opposition. As the proverb tells us, the meat of one is the poison of another. So a man may be at once idolised and scorned-to these a tragedian, to those a buffoon or a blockhead. And there can be no distinct right or wrong in such matters. stream, Blossoming on the great hill-sides where the golden gorses gleam; Blue and rosy, purple and white, 'mid the grasses glistening, They show, 'neath April shadow and shine, the harbingers of Spring. Stern the Winter's sway has been, bitter, and fierce, and long, And still o'er the sea the black east wind is singing his dying song; But primrose, snowdrop, and violet join in the old sweet strain, "The frost is over, the snow is gone, we are coming again, again; And from mating bird, and budding bough, and wakening nature swelling, Comes the echo of the joyous news the harbingers are telling. And youth springs out to hail them on happy kindred feet, And sobered life and tranquil age give welcome grave and sweet; CLOSER THAN A BROTHER. IN TWO PARTS. PART I. AN old, old town among the green Kentish hopfields and the green Kentish hills-a town with an old, old church, grim, and grand, and grey as some ancient cathedral, and which was a cathedral once, to judge from the name of the quaint old pile of red-brick, red-tiled buildings hard by, which look, from one side, upon highwalled orchard and churchyard, from the other, upon the lazy, full-brimmed river. "The palace" people still call that ancient pile of peaked gables and quaint oriel windows, loopholed walls, and winding stone steps, which lead down from ivy-hidden postern doors to the river path below; and, if you get permission, will take you to a room where dim frescoes still linger on the walls, and where Cranmer, the last resident archbishop, once dined in homely state. But there are relics of older times than Cranmer's on the other side of the churchthe grey ivy-mantled ruins of an ancient monastery; and clustered near it, hidden in trees, surrounded by quiet meadows and modern gardens, buildings as grey and ivymantled, and which, under the disguise of nineteenth-century roofs and windows and furniture, yet bear the old titles of Priory and Chapter-house. And below all these, many feet below gardens and meadows, church and palace, flows the tranquil river, starred here and there by the floating blossoms of the yellow water-lily; broken by the passage of some heavy barge; or stirred by the fresh, sweet breeze wafted across those low-lying meadows on the farther side. I am looking across those meadows now, I who write this, and who live in one of the above-mentioned houses belonging to the ancient monastery-a beautiful old place, garlanded with rich, red roses; wreathed with green, fragrant limes; and set in a garden redolent of tall, snowwhite lilies, roses pink and creamy, and masses of scarlet geranium. Tangled sprays of feathering jasmine and thorny, crimson-blossomed rose boughs, wave and dangle over the garden-wall, thrusting |