made it as magnetic to the heart as, in its weirdness, it was entrancing to the imagination, and as, in its tremendous power, it was impressive to the mind. Those moments in which the solitary old man remembers his lost youth and the dying friend who committed a daughter to his paternal care, and those in which he ruminates upon his age and loneliness - the moments, that is to say, in which the heart irradiates the brain are brightly illuminative of the nature of Richelieu; and of those Booth perceived and imparted the full significance. He did not strive to be literally historical - although his personal resemblance, when made up for the part, to a bust of Richelieu which stands in the Louvre, was exact - but he kept close to the poet's ideal of sympathy with all that is virtuous, innocent, beautiful, noble, and right; and that ideal he made alluring by the charm of personality. Other actors have made Richelieu correct; have produced startling effects at specific points; have shown a right instinct as to his force of will, his grim humour, his little vanities, his indirection, his sacerdotal pride and pomp, his intellectual poise, his energetic temperament, his kindliness, and his craft; but Booth, alone in our time, invested him with a sustained, irresistible fascination. The performance was completely illusive. It caused the stage to be forgotten. It presented a great man; and, as is always true with genius, the greatness of that priest and ruler was seen, or, rather, was felt, to be personal, and not official; inherent in himself, and not dependent on his place and adjuncts. Richelieu, as a mere fact, is wise virtue contending against vice and treason; strength protecting innocence; and, therefore, naturally,

is stimulative of human sympathy. But abstract righteousness alone might neither interest in itself nor gladden in its triumph. Richelieu must be much more than good, and the result of a portrayal of him must far exceed complacent satisfaction. Booth gave him the potency of innate charm; made him lovable by a grace that was ingrained and a beauty of the soul that hallowed and exalted not only the man himself but all who beheld him. To that actor was known the austere majesty and sad isolation of a thinker who is poised above his time. By him was understood the loneliness of the unselfish heart which, grown old in sorrow, no longer nourishes the least hope or dream of happiness for itself, but lovingly impels endeavour for the happiness of others. It was noble and beautiful exaltation of spirit that made Booth's embodiment of Richelieu at once fascinating and beneficent. The acting, also, gave exquisite touches of deft simulation. The refinement of it suggested the gossamer texture, the aristocratic hue and the faint fragrance of old lace. Even in its moments of banter, or what might almost be named frivolity, it was permeated and controlled by perfect taste. Booth was especially fine in the delicate tracery with which, during the first act, the character is unfolded, and in the delivery of the soliloquies. To be adequate in soliloquy is more difficult on the stage than to be adequate in anything else, and our generation has not seen Booth's superior in the utterance of it.

In the character of Richelieu the thoughtful, poetic quality of Booth's acting, together with its vital spirit, magnetic power, and complex, delicate, polished, and always seemingly spontaneous mechanism, were impres

sively displayed. There has been no nobler figure on the modern stage-no figure more fascinating in the contrasted elements of its constitution. It was grandly austere, and yet tenderly romantic; solidly founded on the repose of the philosopher, yet fiery with the knightly valour of youth; full of the pathos that invests a lonely spiritual exaltation the mountain solitude of wisdom and of conquered sorrow-yet lovingly human, and sensitive to every wafture of joy and grief in the common lot of mankind. Lofty and fair as an ideal of powerful goodness protecting the weakness and innocence of imperilled virtue, it easily carried the affection of human hearts; but its supreme excellence was the realisation of an ideal trait - the attainment and expression of the majesty which is possible to a human soul, when, through an ample experience of the conflicts of life, it has risen above all the hopes and fears, all the doubt and weakness, all the passions and feelings of mortality.

And this was an excellence that art alone cannot supply — a radiation of the spirit of the man within the actor, passing into the character that he assumed, because awakened and lured by a kindred tone in the character, and thus filling and suffusing it with a sublime light. It is not alone significant that Booth built up the part with delicate mechanism; that he sustained the identity so well as to make his spectator forget that it was a fiction; that he was splendidly vehement in the towering and awful anathema of the Church; but that, behind the trained power, skill, and many accomplishments of the actor, there was in him an exuberant wealth of the imaginative temperament of

genius, never growing dim or weary, never lapsing into routine mannerism, never inadequate to invest a creation of literary fancy with the stately person and the lofty soul that alone can give it a dramatic existence. The wonder is often felt that an actor should be able to continue, night after night, playing the same part: it is not remembered that this capacity of imaginative living, this inexhaustible temperament of fire and action, is precisely what constitutes the actor's natural wealth, and authenticates his personal preordination to the pursuit wherein he lives. The spectacle of Booth's Richelieu, fine as it was when viewed as art, engaged and impressed thought far more as the exponent of dramatic fitness and a matchless equipment for characters of ideal majesty. The applause that so often hailed his exploit-ringing through the theatre in bursts of lofty cheer - was not for either the general accuracy or the special points of Richelieu, but was the quick, bright, natural, ungovernable response to the eloquence of genius.

BERTUCCIO.

PHYSICAL deformity has seldom been borne with patience. It reacts on the nature that it incloses. It saddens or it embitters. A deformed man is usually reticent and secretive. He shrinks from contact or observation. He suspects, on every hand, pity, contempt, aversion, or ridicule. He is morbidly sensitive. He withdraws his life from the obvious and sun-lit pathways of the world, and dwells in solitary and sequestered places; and there he nurses his emotions, whether