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

of love or hate, till they acquire intense strength. If he be a man of deep heart and proud mind, and if his nature be illumined by the light of genius, he will develop an amazing individuality. Pope and Byron come out of literary history as apt examples of that truth. Those, of course, are exponents of an exceptional class; but as the same human nature runs through all classes the same general results are apparent in all the victims of deformity. The deformed man is placed at a disadvantage, and the cruel fact shapes. and colours his whole experience. That experience, accordingly, attracts the analytical student of life, and stimulates the imaginative literary artist, by suggesting sharp dramatic contrasts. Sir Walter Scott has delineated phases of it, with great vigour of treatment, and in a beautiful atmosphere of romance, in his novel of The Black Dwarf. Other authors have touched upon it, with more or less success; but no other great writer seems to have brooded over it so deeply as Victor Hugo has, for the purposes of art. To remind the reader of his Quasimodo is at once to illustrate this meaning and to suggest a representative embodiment of this exceptional individuality. Bertuccio, in The Fool's Revenge, is, in some respects, a companion portrait; and certainly it is one of the most affecting images in literature, of the misery that laughs.

The Fool's Revenge fulfils the purpose of tragedyfor it overwhelms the mind with terror and the heart with pity, and therein it tends to elevate the moral and spiritual being. It thus exercises as much beneficent force as can be expected to flow from this form of art. It is neatly constructed, in three acts, and tersely

written in serviceable blank verse. Its author, Tom Taylor, claimed it as substantially an original work, but he named Victor Hugo's Le Roi S'Amuse as its basis. The drift of it is a rebuke of the wickedness of human quest for revenge. The lesson of it is the ancient Hebrew Bible lesson, that vengeance is an attribute to God. Its central figure is a deformed man, austere in mind, but tender in heart, who first is embittered by the natural reactionary force of his deformity, and then is tortured into a demoniac condition, by a foul, treacherous, oppressive, and cruel spoliation of his domestic peace. That exceptional type of man it presents under the stress of love, misery, wrath, and hatred. The wretched creature has been crazed by the forcible abduction of his virtuous and faithful wife, and thereupon he instigates a ruthless villain, in whose service he lives, as a court jester, the scene and time being Faenza, in Italy, 1488,- to abduct the wife of his enemy. In that hellish work he personally assists; and thus, by a series of strange accidents, he becomes instrumental in betraying his own daughter into the hands of a libidinous and detestable swine. He rescues her, indeed, at the last; but not until he has passed through the torments of hell, and only when the star of his life goes down in a storm of frenzy and a sea of murder.

That wretched man and those actions and emotions Booth depicted, with tremendous vigour and appalling sincerity. The first strong situation of the piece, occurring at the end of the second act, exacts a tumultuous utterance of sardonic exultation and demoniac glee, over the success of a scheme of wicked vengeance. It is a night scene; and the deformed