"I shall not soon forget," to again quote the doctor, “that January night of 1827, on which he reappeared at Drury Lane in Shylock. A rush so fearful, an audience so packed, and a reconciliation so complete, acting so faultless, and a dramatic enjoyment so exquisite, I never experienced. Nothing was heeded - indeed, the scenes were passed over until Shylock was to appear; and I have heard no such shout since as that which greeted him. Fire, strength, beauty, every quality of the actor, seemed to have acquired fresh life. It was all deceptive, however. The actor was all but extinguished after this convulsive, but seemingly natural, effect. He lay in bed at the Hummum's hotel all day, amusing himself melancholily with his Indian gewgaws, and trying to find a healthy tonic in cognac."

Grattan's description of his appearance soon afterward, in his play of "Ben Nazir," is a dark picture of failing powers. After describing his entrance, his splendid dress, and the thunders of applause that greeted him, he goes on to say:

"He spoke, but what a speech! The one I wrote consisted of eight or nine lines; his was of two or three sentences, but not six consecutive words of the text. His look, his manner, his tone, were to me quite appalling; to any other observer they must have been incomprehensible. He stood fixed, drawled out his incoherent words, and gave the notion of a man who had been half-hanged, and then dragged through a horse-pond.

Kean went through it like a man in the last stage of exhaustion and decay. The act closed, a dead silence followed the fall of the curtain."

Yet still at times transient gleams of his old powers would burst forth with all the old electric fire, and audiences still crushed to suffocation to see him.

"To those," says Doran, "who saw him from the front, there was not a trace of weakening power in him. But oh, ye

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few who stood between the wings, where a chair was placed for him, do you not remember the saddening spectacle of that wrecked genius?-a man in his very prime, with not merely the attributes of age about him, but with some of the infirmities of it, which are wont to try the heart of love itself. Have you forgotten that helpless, speechless, fainting mass bent up in that chair; or the very unsavory odor of the very brown, very hot, and very strong brandy-and-water, which alone kept alive the once-noble Moor? Ay, and still-noble Moor; for when his time came, he looked about as from a dream, and sighed, and painfully got to his feet, swayed like a column, an earthquake, and in not more time than is required in telling it, was before the audience, as strong and as intellectually beautiful as of old; but only happy in the applause, which gave him a little breathing-space, and saved him from falling dead upon the stage."

Still for another year or two he went on acting, trying to create new parts, but memory and power failing him, and all the beauty of his face gone, although he was scarcely forty years of age.

On the 25th of March, 1833, came the end. That night was to celebrate the reconciliation between the father and son, and for the first and the last time they were to appear on the stage together, Charles playing Iago to his father's Othello. The event created a great excitement among play-goers; the house was crammed. Kean went through the part "dying as he went," until he came to the "Farewell," and the strangely-appropriate words "Othello's occupation's gone." Then he gasped for breath, and fell upon his son's shoulder, moaning, “I am dying-speak to them for me!" And so the curtain descended upon him-forever. He was conveyed to Richmond. "Come home to me; forget

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and forgive!" he wrote to his wife. And she came. An hour before he died, he sprang out of bed, exclaiming, “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!" and he expired with the dying words of Octavian, "Farewell, Flo-Floranthe!" on his lips. This was on the 15th of May, 1833. He was buried in Richmond churchyard.

CHAPTER IX.

CHARLES YOUNG.

Kean's Rival in Acting, and Contrast in Character.-A Reputable, Laborious, and Conscientious Life.-Charles Young holds the London Stage for Twenty-five Years against Kemble, Cooke, and Garrick.-The English Talma, and his Intimacy with Sir Walter Scott and other Great Men of the Time,

THE last chapter sketched the career of a great but most erring and unhappy genius; the present has taken that of an actor who in every respect was his opposite. Yet man is much as his opportunities make him; and while Kean was reared miserably, cursed in a bad mother, a proud soul exposed to every humiliation of destitution, Young was brought up in comfort, almost affluence, and received the training and education of a gentleman. Few if any of the actor's vicissitudes and trials fell to his lot; whether by force of ability or good fortune, probably a little of both, he escaped that dreary progression, those toils and hardships, which have usually imbittered and checkered the lives of the most fortunate actors. He mounted at once to the highest rung of the ladder; and after a few years of probation in comfortable provincial engagements, he took that position

upon the London stage which he relinquished only by his own free will, and retired into private life a man honored by all who knew him.

Such contrasts set us thinking. Had those two children changed places in their infancy, would their lives have still been the same, or might they have changed places? Of course in such speculations we must make allowance for idiosyncrasies.

Charles Mayne Young was born in Fenchurch Street in 1777. His father, who was a surgeon, appears to have been anything rather than an estimable character. While yet a child, Charles went on a visit to his aunt and uncle, Dr. Müller, the court physician, at Copenhagen. There the King and Queen and Queen Dowager became so fond of the boy that they would have kept him altogether. At parting they gave him a purse, which the Queen had worked for him, filled with gold, a watch, and two portraits which had been taken of him—one of these was hung in the King's private cabinet.

He commenced his education at Eton, but altered circumstances at home, through the dissipated habits of the head of the household, rendered his stay there brief, and he was removed to Merchant Taylors'. By-and-by the father's conduct rose to such a height of infamy that the sons removed their mother from beneath the paternal roof, and Charles took her support upon himself.

His first entrance into life was as a merchant's clerk. It does not appear how he first came to entertain the idea of taking to the stage; the only information to be gleaned upon the subject is that given in the "Memoirs " of Mathews, who relates that he met him as an amateur in some theatricals held in a loft over a stable in Short's Gardens, Drury Lane. Young soon grew tired of the

dull drudgery of office work, and in 1798 we find him making his début at Liverpool, under the name of Mr. Green, in Young Norval. His success appears to have been immediate and assured. The year after his début we find him engaged for the principal business at Manchester. Thence he migrated to Edinburgh, and at once established himself in so high a position, both histrionically and socially, that in 1802 we hear of his being a guest at the table of Walter Scott, with whom he contracted an intimate friendship.

It was in 1804 that he first met the beautiful Julia Grimani, who soon afterward became his wife. There was something of romance attached to this lady's history. The Grimanis were an ancient and illustrious family, who had given five Doges to Venice. Gaspar, Julia's father, had been destined for the church, but not only did he break his own vow of celibacy, but persuaded a nun to do the same. They were married, and coming over to England they took up their abode here. After some years he became professor of mathematics at Eton. But ere this his first wife had died, and he had married a beautiful girl named Mademoiselle Wagner, who became the mother of Julia. This child was a protégée of the Countess of Suffolk, under whose roof she resided some time. There she received offers of marriage from more than one nobleman, but declined them all, and on her father's death determined to take to the stage. Her friends, as a matter of course, did all in their power to dissuade her from such a career, but in vain. She appeared toward the close of the Haymarket season in 1804 as Juliet, and made so decided a success that the managers of all three theatres were anxious to secure her. She determined, however, to go into the provinces