tual intonation with which he delivered the following speech, soon changed the feeling of the auditor: "I am your creature, madam, But as I was obliged to bring These from the Tower, these from the old Exchange, Coming from the room filled with riches which he has unexpectedly inherited, he says "I am sublimed, I walk on air!" not with that epicurism of elocution which the words invite, but with the roughened voice of a man who could not contain his selfish joy. He presided at his solitary banquet with a kind of Satanic grace. When, in the midst of it, terror at the appearance of his brother gives way to rage, and he dashes past him with the words "Bar not my way! The world is wide enough For thee and me,” he sounded the grand organ stop of his voice, with that easy power, which at once startled and charmed the audience. SIR EDWARD MORTIMER. WILLIAM GODWIN, on seeing Booth, at the age of twenty, play Iago, was so struck with his excellence that he wrote the young tragedian a letter, filled with discriminating praise. From Godwin's novel called "Caleb Williams,” Colman dramatized the play called the "Iron Chest;" and Mr. Booth's portrayal of the principal character, we have always regarded as one of his most effective personations. We use the adjective with deliberate intent. Effective it was beyond measure, and above praise. Indeed, if it had been our actor's purpose to combine in one representation all the daring, and difficult, and terrific feats, in look, voice, action, of which his supple frame was capable, he could not have selected a better field for the exhibition than this play affords. Who that ever saw Mr. Booth as Sir Edward Mortimer, can forget his utterance of the name "Adam, Adam Winterton," just before the scene draws, and discloses him seated at his library table? It carried from the invisible speaker the whole tragedy, in its muffled, yet resonant and boding cry. The opening soliloquy of Sir Edward, a sensitive, generous, honorable man, but stained with the guilt of a secret murder, was filled with melancholy beauty. He invokes "That mind of man Which lifts us to the stars, which carries us As swallows skim the air." Booth gave, with his picturing voice, the very look of the chafed and billowy sea then, by a fine ethereal transition, the motion of a bird in air. The passion of this play is, as the actor once quaintly expressed it, "on the tight jump all the time." Every scene in which Sir Edward appears has a pyrotechnic brilliancy. The interest centres, not in the evolution of character, but in the presentation of special scenes and situations. These were given with wonderful resource of voice and look, and equal vividness and variety of action. Witness for instance the first scene with the secretary, Wilford, who seeks to penetrate his master's secret. "Sirrah! What am I about? Oh, Honor! Honor! Thy pile should be so uniform, displace One atom of thee, and the slightest breath Of a rude peasant makes thine owner tremble The rapid changes in voice and manner, in this speech, and the original intonation of the concluding phrase, at once reckless and sustained, and as if the building were about tumbling into ruin, were marked by Mr. Booth's unique and inimitable method. No actor we have ever seen seemed to have such control over the vital and involuntary functions. He would tremble from head to foot, or tremble in one outstretched arm to the finger tips, while holding it in the firm grasp of the other hand scene of this play, where he says as in the last "Curse on my flesh to tremble so." The veins of his corded and magnificent neck would swell, and the whole throat and face become suffused with crimson in a moment, in the crisis of passion, to be succeeded on the ebb of feeling by an ashy paleness. To throw the blood into the face is a comparatively easy feat for a sanguine man by simply holding the breath; but for a man of pale complexion to speak passionate and thrilling words pending the suffusion, is quite another thing. On the other hand it must be observed that no amount of merely physical exertion, or exercise of voice, could bring color into that pale, proud, intellectual face. This was abundantly shown in Shylock, in Lear, in Hamlet, where the passion was intense, but where the face continued clear and pale. To return to Sir Edward. In the terrible scene in the library, when he proposes the oath of secrecy to Wilford, and "Waxing desperate with imagination," reënacts the murder he has confessed; in the threat to Wilford "Dare to make The slightest movement to awake my fears, Till lingering death shall end his agony, the accents of which, even to the last reverberant word, ring startlingly clear in our memory in all this scene no color mantled his face, or mingled in the manifest working of his features. But when old Winterton |