I seem still to hear the words and the voice as I pen this passage; now composed, now grand as the foamy billows; so flutelike on the word 'moon,' creating a scene with the sound, and anon sharp, harsh, fierce in the last line, with a look upward from those matchless eyes, that rendered the troop visible, and their howl perceptible to the ear; the whole serenity of the man, and the solidity of his temper, being less illustrated by the assurance in the succeeding words than by the exquisite music in the tone with which he uttered the word 'brightness.””

Maturin's "Bertram," a gloomy but powerful play, and Sir Edward Mortimer, in "The Iron Chest," may be added to his list of great triumphs.

He was now the lion of the day; all the greatest men of the time, poets, statesmen, nobles, crowded his dressing-room and invited him to be their guest. Lord Byron sent him presents and invited him to dinner. At the close of the Drury Lane season he went "starring" into the country. At Edinburgh he was paid one hundred guineas a night for six nights. Fortune poured down upon him her Danaë showers, and we have pictures of young Charles playing with heaps of guineas, and banknotes littering the room.

In succeeding seasons he appeared in many new parts, but made only one great success, King Lear. In 1820 he paid his first visit to America. Upon his return he appeared in a great variety of characters, tragic and comic, far too many for his fame, which began to be injured by such injudicious displays of versatility.

It is sad to turn from these records of splendid genius to those of the actor's private life. Success did drive him mad, for only a madman could have so trampled upon the glorious gifts of Fortune as he did; dissipation, in its worst form, frequently too obvious to the eyes of

the audience, marring his acting and degrading him as a man, and a preference for low company, were rapidly preparing his downfall. He would quit the society of Lord Byron for that of pugilists! But probably this was more a manifestation of intense pride and sensitiveness than the result of preference. He was painfully conscious of the defects of his education, and of his ignorance of the manners of good society; to commit a solecism in good-breeding was exquisite pain to him; thus the apprehension of doing so kept him in a state of extreme discomfort. Among his companions of the tavern he had no such fears, and was, besides, what he liked to be a king. At length occurred that terrible scandal (in connection with the wife of a certain alderman) which blighted his whole future life and wrecked his home-happiness forever; the audience, that once hung so breathlessly upon his lips and hailed him with such shouts of acclamation, now howled and hissed and almost drove him from the stage. Dauntless as ever, he gave them scorn for scorn, insult for insult, as daringly as ever he did the poor yokels who offended him in his strolling days. But such a contest could not but terminate in his own discomfiture; his friends and patrons fell from him, his wife and child left him, the latter taking to the stage to support his mother. This last was, perhaps, the heaviest blow of all to Kean, who was bitterly opposed to Charles becoming an actor, and there was estrangement for years between father and son. They were reconciled only when the former was upon the brink of the grave. Deserted by friends and fortune, England was no longer a home for him, and so he paid a second visit to America.

"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; has 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

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

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