notte and his Benedick were indifferent; his Stranger was artificial; his Petruchio was a bluff type of boisterous frolic. Booth was distinctively tragic, and he required characters of stalwart fibre. He was a poetical actor, and his delicate and exquisite genius tended more to beauty and symmetry than to wild and whirling emotion. He never degraded a Shakespearian conception to prose and to clay; he never substituted a paroxysm for a distinct, round, beautiful ideal. Art should understand itself and make itself understood. Acting is the presentment of definite forms transfused with fire, and those artists are its best exponents who best present those results. Such an artist was Booth; and to all such artists the world is delivered. Impatience and apathy, indeed, are their foes. To every intellectual man there comes a time when surrounding dulness and indurated folly and selfishness are irksome and irritating; and time, trouble, and sorrow have a way of imbuing, with a sober, russet colour, first the mind and then its works, and so leading in the autumn twilight of indifference. But the tenderness of a deep heart, the strength of an aspiring soul, and the cheer and promise of Nature. may surely be trusted to defeat those tyrants of experience.

"Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower, -
We will grieve not; rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy

Which having been must ever be;

In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;

In the faith that looks through death;

In years that bring the philosophic mind."

III.

MEMORIALS.

"Vitæ bene actæ jucundissima est recordatio."

CICERO.

III.

MEMORIALS.

SARGENT'S PORTRAIT OF EDWIN BOOTH AT "THE PLAYERS."

THAT face which no man ever saw

And from his memory banished quite,
With eyes in which are Hamlet's awe
And Cardinal Richelieu's subtle light,

Looks from this frame. A master's hand
Has set the master-player here,

In the fair temple that he planned

Not for himself. To us most dear

This image of him!" It was thus

He looked; such pallor touched his cheek;
With that same grace he greeted us
Nay 'tis the man, could it but speak!"
Sad words that shall be said some day

Far fall the day! O cruel Time,
Whose breath sweeps mortal things away,
Spare long this image of his prime,
That others standing in the place,

Where, save as ghosts, we come no more,
May know what sweet majestic face
The gentle Prince of Players wore !

THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH.

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