scenes between Faust and Mephisto- the failure of the human mind in its away, to be followed shortly by his wife, the grand duchess. Goethe bore himself through these trials with equa nimity, according to his habit, and though suffering from the effects of age, was still employed in his literary labors. His last work was the completion of Faust, already mentioned, In the in his eighty-second year. spring of 1832 he was taken ill with a cold, bringing on a nervous fever, which, within a week, on the 22d of March, resulted in his death. His last JOHN PHILIP KEMBLE. T He HE records of the Kemble family | Ward, an actor of some reputation, a are the most brilliant in the an- contemporary of Betterton, who, in nals of the British stage. There was 1723, took a leading part on the London a shadowy claim or tradition among boards in the production of the amiathem of a member of the race, a Kem- ble poet Fenton's "Mariamne." ble, who, in the great civil war, fought subsequently became a strolling manon the royal side at Worcester; and of ager, his daughter, Sarah, acting with another, a Roman Catholic priest, who him before the country audiences. In the innocently suffered death at Hereford, course of this random life, she fell in a martyr to the fears of England in love with, and married-it was a runthe panic consequent on that dar- away match, without the consent of ing imposition on religious credulity, her parents-Roger Kemble, a suborknown as the Titus Oates plot. dinate member of the company, a man Before he went to the scaffold, it is of some education, with a gentle disposaid, he called for a pipe of tobacco, sition, of fine personal appearance, an and smoked it, which was commemo- swering to her own beauty, of the us rated in the region where he suffered, ual poverty of his profession, and a by a last pipe being called "Kemble's Roman Catholic. Her father was repipe." Henry Siddons claimed that luctantly reconciled to the marriage, the name Kemble and Campbell were humorously expressing his forgiveness originally the same, which opened an in a jest, at the expense of the brideearly and distinguished Scottish ances- groom-"Sarah, you have not disobeyed me. I told you never to marry an actor, and you have married a man who neither is, nor ever can be an actor." Notwithstanding this facetious anathema, Roger Kemble seems in his way to have played well his part, and when, at the age of seventy, brought into notice by his illustrious children, but as this was in a conversation with the author of "The Pleasures of Hope," it may only have been thrown out in a spirit of mutual compliment. The known dramatic ancestry in the long lineage of players of the tribe, carries us back in the early days of the eighteenth century to a person named ever seen. he appeared for the first time before John took the part of the Duke of the London public, at the Haymarket York, and his sister that of Elizabeth, Theatre, on occasion of his daughter-in- the children of the royal martyr. The law, Mrs. Stephen Kemble's benefit, he passionate life of the stage was thus acquitted himself with credit in the blended with their earliest thoughts character of the Miller of Mansfield. and affections, and its influence never When Boaden, the dramatic biogra- left them. John Kemble, indeed, was pher, visited Roger Kemble and his separated from it for a time in his wife in their old age, the latter fondly youth in the pursuit of a very different spoke of her husband, sitting apart in class of studies, apparently with a view the room unconscious of her remarks, of adopting the clerical calling, being as the only gentleman Falstaff she had sent by his father, after a juvenile course at a school at Worcester, to the Roman Catholic seminary of Sedgeley Park, in Staffordshire, and thence to the notable English college of the same church, at Douay, in France. This new mode of life did not end in making Kemble a priest; but it gave him the training and accomplishments of a scholar, with a taste for lettered refinements which long afterwards colored his professional career. He became familiar with the Fathers of the church, made the acquaintance of Greek and Roman authors, while he did not neglect the literature of his own land, acquiring at the college a reputation for his graceful and harmonious recitations from the English poets. The actor, in fact, was not crushed, but developed by what he learnt at Douay. Returning to England, contrary to the wishes and expectations of his father, deliberately choosing the stage as a profession, he made his first appearance in a strolling company at Wolverhampton, as the hero in Lee's tragedy, "Theodosius." This was in January, 1776, the year of Garrick's retirement from the theatre. No one suspected that this humble novice was to be his successor in fame, though in a very different style Returning to their early married life, it was while Kemble was in charge of his father-in-law's itinerant company, to the management of which he had succeeded, that their eldest son John Philip was born, the 1st of February, 1757, at Prescot, in Lancashire. He was the second child, a sister Sarah, the Siddons of the British stage, having preceded him in the summer of 1755. The father being a Roman Catholic, and the mother a Protestant, it was arranged in the family that the sons were to be brought up in the former faith, the daughters in the latter. The stage, in the shiftless experience of the family, was not regarded as a desirable calling for either. Brother and sister, however, were both in their childhood on the boards, to which in that strolling life access was so easy, and from which in the struggles of poverty, escape was hardly possible. From a play-bill of the year 1767, when the boy was but ten, it appears that they acted together at Worcester in Havard's once admired tragedy, "Charles I.," a play, freighted with the solemnity of a nation's grief, then celebrated for its pathetic interest. In this performance, |