cara, on the stage, has all along been embodied by men of genius. The elder Booth, to whom the part was first allotted, refused to act it, and it was assumed by Macready; but Booth afterwards played it, and made a great fame in it; and Edwin Booth retained it in his repertory, and for the most part sustained, as Pescara, the tradition of his father's greatness. Booth invariably conquered admiration by one attribute in which he was pre-eminent — the faculty to assume a sweet placidity of ingenuousness, veiling, but not concealing, a cool, airy, infernal depravity. That was seen in his Iago and his Richard the Third; but in those parts the artistic hypocrisy is intended to deceive, and it does deceive. In Pescara, on the other hand, the lurid light of hell is allowed to play freely, just beneath the mocking "smiles and affability" of simulated kindness. The intention of Pescara is to terrify, even while he pretends to soothe; and in Booth's acting that attribute of dangerous, jeering, menacing duplicity was so terrible that often it impelled the spectator quite over the line of terror, into the shuddering mood of hysterical laughter. In the story of the dream and in the quarrel with Hemeya that predominant attribute of the character was made brilliantly visible. Booth proved entirely adequate at the thrilling points of the performance- the famous entrance, to part the lovers; the equally famous "There shall be music, too"; the baffled cry of

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damnation," and the scene of the torture and rescue. There was no effort made to reconcile the character to any accepted standard of human nature. There is, however, but too much reason to believe that such men have existed and do exist. Booth's first appearance in The

Apostate was made in his boyhood, at Wilmington, Delaware, where he played Hemeya. His father acted Pescara, and in that, as in some other characters, his father was his model.

LUCIUS JUNIUS BRUTUS.

THE question as to the relative excellence of specific personations, determinable through comparison of the several works of an actor, though often strenuously discussed, is less important than the large, comprehensive question as to the excellence of his influence upon the age in which he lives, expressed in his adequate fulfilment of noble ideals, and in his liberal diffusion of virtuous emotion. The puissant embodiment of such characters as William Tell and Lucius Junius Brutus does more to keep alive in the popular heart the love of true liberty and the sense of its inestimable worth, than could be accomplished by almost any combination of the wisest and strongest forces of the age. The observer will, of course, consider that the author of Brutus has not made his ideal either a vast or a representative one, and that to try a personation of Brutus by the standard of the piece itself is not, as so often is the case in Shakespeare, to try it by the standard of Brutus is exceptional, abnor

universal human nature.

mal, and of an artificially mixed condition, — albeit the fibre of nature runs through him. An actor, accordingly, may take large license in his interpretation.

In its possibilities for acting, the part is greater than the piece, for it comprises some of the attributes that

constitute the character of Virginius, and thus it kindles in an actor the robust manliness, splendid dignity, and heroic exaltation that make the perfect ideal of the Roman father. Both men are depicted as fine, tender, simple, magnanimous, just; both are patriotic; both sacrifice all, for the public welfare; each destroys his only child; each perishes of a broken heart, under a weight of misery so terrible that human nature cannot bear it; and in each case there is the element of insanity, that of Virginius being real and that of Brutus being assumed. But, while certain of the attributes of character are coincident and certain lines of the experience are parallel, the identities of those two Roman heroes remain distinct, and a competent actor will evince fine intuition and conscientious thoroughness of artistic study in giving to each a separate individuality. Brutus should not be made as delicate in fibre or as sweet in temperament as Virginius, for the life of Brutus has no sunshine in it, but only wrong, violence, and discord. Repressed passion has warped it; suffering has despoiled and blighted it; long brooding over the purpose of revenge has embittered and hardened it; long simulation of madness has given to it a sardonic light. Virginius, on the threshold of the story, has already won, by the fascination of love. Brutus, beginning at once in a bitter and afflicting assumption of gleeful delirium, wins by the fascination of terror. It is not till the thundercloud has burst and the lightning launched its bolt that the spell of human tenderness begins to make itself felt

through the workings of the father's heart, and in that awful climax of heroic misery which is at once his victory and his death.

Booth manifested an unerring intellectual purpose in individualising Brutus, so as to make terror paramount above pathos, and to crown a life of remediless suffering and consecrated struggle with a death of awful sublimity. Virginius, a part that Booth never played, -lives in the affections; Brutus in the imagination. The one burns with a steady light, and is massive and lovable; the other shines with the portentous glare of the midnight beacon, and is rugged, wild, and brilliant. If the crime upon which the story of Brutus is made to rest were not of such a sinister and odious character, so foul, hateful, and shocking, the tragedy would, no doubt, be held in higher esteem. But, in that respect, its suggestions are very horrible. The piece suffers, likewise, from defective construction. Payne's Brutus, as theatrical students are aware, is, to some extent, a cento of different works, and for that reason it produces the effect of a series of episodes of Roman history, rather than a single dramatic narrative. The story of Brutus, the story of Lucretia, the story of Tarquinia and Titus, and the story of Tullia are all knotted together in it, and the latter half of its action is almost disjoined from the former half. The consequence is that, in the reading of the piece, attention is somewhat distracted from a central figure, and Brutus seems to be several persons rather than one. To neutralise this diffusion of interest, the actor must, in a representation, so dominate the part as to fuse all its elements and phases together, and make it a unity. To show the steady radiance of reason behind the glare of lunacy, to reveal in fitful glimpses the majesty of iron virtue beneath the vacant aspect of jocular imbecility, to be

always one splendid and terrible personification of ideal heroism, while seeming to be a broken and heedless wretch, was to offer a great and thrilling embodiment, and that Booth presented. The execution was invariably that of clear-sighted art fulfilling a definite purpose. No actor worthy of the name could go through the tempest scene of Payne's tragedy without tremendous emotion. Edmund Kean gave the curse on Sextus in a gasping whisper, all the while clutching convulsively at his throat, as though strangling with passion: and the effect must have been terrific. Booth subdued the tumult of the situation, and augmented its power, by intense concentration, and a low, restrained, but incisive and righteously vindictive utterance, withering, ominous, dreadful, and set off by action that fully conveyed the delirious ecstasy of implacable vengeance. That was the brilliant climax of the tragedy. But the supremely fine part of Booth's Brutus was the judgment scene, which exhibits the patriot's passionate sense of duty, predominant, through a dreadful struggle, over the tender promptings of the father's affectionate heart. The stage never offered anything nobler than that image of moral greatness triumphant in heart-rending grief. The situation, a broken-hearted father condemning his beloved son to death, for the good of the commonwealth, — would, of itself, do much to allure pity: but only a manly and tender nature could undeviatingly sustain the burden of the scene and keep the illusion unbroken. Volumes of reasoning could not be so eloquent as that single work, to avouch the dignity of dramatic art and the social beneficence of a well-ordered stage. The beautiful delicacy of Booth's acting, in the