along the spar-gemmed labyrinths of Shakespeare's more intricate meanings.

Our course of remark has drifted us into that cloud which hung over and partially obscured his fame, and which, in good men's minds, affixed a blot on his personal character. We mean what has been called, with needless exaggeration, his habit of intoxication. We would gladly avoid this subject, but "omittance is no quittance," and we proceed to set the charge in its true light. During the forty years, save one, which bounded his dramatic career, Mr. Booth's habit of life, both on his farm and on the stage, was exemplarily temperate. His reverence for the sacredness of all life amounted to a superstition. He abstained for many years on principle from the use of animal food. An

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extravagant and erring spirit," allied to madness, would sometimes take possession of him, and hurry him away from the theatre at the moment the performance was to begin; and to this cause, and not to intoxication, should be attributed the not infrequent disappointment of the audience. Still it must be confessed, with grief and pity, that the baser charge was often true. A resort to

stimulants is the actor's special bane and ever-present temptation: to an actor of Mr. Booth's spontaneous method, sometimes an irresistible temptation. The histrionic art was to him a cultus, a religion. Not to speak it profanely, he offered himself a perpetual sacrifice to the god of terror and of beauty; he staked "soul and body on the action both," and the exhaustion sometimes attendant upon his performance of the fiery rite, was relieved by means questionable, pitiful, pardonable.

The accident by which his nose was broken, spoiling forever his noble profile, threatened for a time the more serious disaster of a permanent injury to his voice. Immediately on his recovery he began to play. To those who, during these first performances, recalled the perfect features and the resonant tones of former years, the sight and sound were indeed pitiful. The head tones were scarcely perceptible. But instead of humoring this vocal infirmity, he spoke with all the old mastery of motive, and let the result take care of itself. By this persistent method, in less than two years after the accident, his voice had completely recovered its original scope, variety, and power; as we can attest

by close, solicitous, and comparative observation. To this restoration, added to the autumnal ripeness of his physical and mental powers, we owe the undiminished zest and life of his impersonations.

We pass on to examples, in the hope that the reader will bring to our record that "productive imagination" which alone can render fruitful the endeavor to rekindle the fire of eye and action, to give form to air, to bring a voice out of the silent past, and to conjure up before him a kingly and inspiring presence.

RICHARD III.

We do not quarrel with Colley Cibber, player and playwright of the time of Garrick, because he saw fit, for the convenience of the stage, to compose, out of several historical plays of Shakespeare, in which the same characters occur, one entitled "Richard the Third." But we do blame him for his audacious excision of the living limbs, his more audacious interpolations in the text, and his senseless changes in the character of that Richard, third of the name, whom Shakespeare delineated. He has obliterated those lights of human feeling, which the great master touched in, and which alone redeem Richard from the condition of vulgar villainy, into which Cibber plunges him. The buoyant, aspiring soul of the usurper, finding expression in such language as this

"But I was born so high,

Our aiery buildeth in the cedar's top

And dallies with the wind, and scorns the sun,"

does nowhere appear.

In Shakespeare, the villainy is incidental to the ambition; and is besides relieved by genius, energy, and vast and ready variety of intellectual resources. In Cibber's version, villainy is the substance of the character; the very element in which it sits and revels. In Shakespeare, when multiplying dangers and ghostly visitation have combined to open in Richard's soul" the access and passage to remorse," occurs this remarkable utterance:

"There is no creature loves me,

And if I die no soul will pity me!

Cibber wantonly hardens the depravity of the character, below its all-sufficient wickedness. The interpolated scene with Lady Anne, whom Richard had widowed, cajoled, married, and resolved to slay, is simply atrocious and inhuman.

But the play, such as it is, shining with Shakespeare's genius, blotted by Cibber's folly, has always held the stage; and it is less our purpose to complain of its defects, than to show Mr. Booth's masterly impersonation of the leading part. He is identified with it in the public mind, His performance of it was certain, at any period of