mendous personality, and Booth's crowning success was that he played that scene so as to make his auditors forget the theatre. In the splendid adequacy of the effort, and in the presentation of Richelieu's dual life — the life of the ecclesiastic statesman interested in practical affairs, and the life of the world-worn, grief-stricken, lonely intellect, isolated upon the pinnacle of its grandeur you saw the greatness of Booth's genius. Booth's Richelieu was a noble and touching image of righteous power protecting innocent weakness; and no person who saw it, with appreciation, could help being exalted in magnanimity of spirit and moral worth. It not only delighted the artistic sense of a generation of play-goers, but it was the cause of much practical good, in its influence upon society. People were made better for seeing Booth in Richelieu.

Booth's personation of Lucius Brutus showed his genius in a strong light. The former portion of it was full of singular force; the latter of intense feeling and manly dignity. The character is the Brutus who avenged Lucretia, drove the Tarquin from Rome, and sacrificed his son on the altar of devotion to his country. The dramatist, John Howard Payne, has illustrated that heroism in a four-act tragedy, the action of which culminates in the father's condemnation of the son. At first Brutus simulates madness; then, - a cause for revolt being furnished, in the crime against Lucretia, his spirit breaks loose, and he sweeps on to vengeance. Booth was especially powerful in the imprecation against Sextus and in the address to the people, from the funeral pyre of Lucretia. But it was when portraying the struggle between natural affection

and the sense of justice, that he attained the highest eminence of pathos.

Booth's impersonation of Cardinal Wolsey, - a part that he adopted into his repertory in 1876, playing it for the first time on December 13, that year, at the Arch Street theatre, Philadelphia, — was massive, subtle, picturesque, and remarkable for beauty of elocution. His reading of the farewell speech was deeply pathetic, while his action, expressive of the iron poise, sleepless vigilance, exalted intellectual refinement, and deep-revolving craft of Wolsey, was, at all points, adequate and effective. He made, with admirable skill, the old, conventional points, upon the line, "How much methinks I might despise this man," and upon the exit of Wolsey with Campeius; and his portraiture of the wily churchman's self-communing, in the soliloquy on Anne Boleyn and Henry, was deeply weighted with feeling, intense with purpose, and finely diversified in manner. He made Wolsey a man who is always acting a part, and only now and then drops the mask. His performance was not consonant with history, nor was it conformable to matter-of-fact notions, but it was entirely consonant with the poetic ideal. It denoted the royalty of Wolsey's ambition and the height of intellect at which he is poised; it was fraught with the needful repression; and, at the last, it revealed a strain of pathetic feeling fully level with the high Shakespearian design.

In Fulius Cæsar, more than in any other of Shakespeare's plays, poetry and history are one. The language of the poet is frequently an expanded paraphrase of the language of the historian. That fact should be

remembered, in considering the quality of the acting, in any representation of that tragedy. There is a tendency on the stage to treat imaginative subjects in a mood of realism-to substitute fact for fancy. In presenting the tragedy of Julius Cæsar, however, this cannot lead the actor far wrong, seeing that fact has been religiously preserved in a halo of poetry.

Booth acted Brutus for the second time in his life at Christmas, 1871. His first performance of it was given at the Winter Garden, in 1864, on the occasion of the Shakespeare Benefit. He looked this part perfectly. There is a delusion that Brutus was a large man. In fact the popular idea conceives the noble Roman as invariably gigantic. There were big Romans; but the big ones were not always the most virtuous. Brutus, like Cassius, was lean and paleand Booth's physical embodiment of the character was therefore accurate. He invested the performance with a delicate spirit; and, in the scene of the assassination and that of the midnight spectre, his profound emotion stirred the deepest sympathy. Shakespeare has been as true to the great moral law of the universe as to the fact of history. "They say blood will have blood." A tyrant is slain — but the heart of the slayer is cleft by his own sword, in expiation of the dread sacrifice. There are lessons of the gravest import to be learned from Fulius Cæsar. Americans are apt to think that liberty is an invention of the New World and modern times. It is well to be reminded that others fought and suffered for it before America was heard of, and that the same struggle has long been going on in the world, between the effort of what is good in human