thor might think, in error. But I take the liberty so say, on behalf of this high sense of honour, that it could not have been so wounded at all by the infliction of brutal violence. The first question that an honourable, highly-cultivated spirit would have asked was, whether the offender stood within the lists of gentlemanly appeal? If he did NOT, he would leave the laws to avenge their violated peace. The strength of ONE brute would have moved our genuine Falkland, no more than the KICK of another; and assassination plunged him below his rival; inasmuch as it was more ferocious violence equally remote from chivalrous principle, and a more outrageous violation of the laws. Thus all his crimes and his sufferings are made to reflect upon a principle, from which they never could spring, and the GENTLEMANLY FEELING is assailed, in consequence of actions which a gentleman would never commit. out. Colman found in Gilpin's Forest Scenery some poachers, and other persons of a picturesque cast that enabled him to compose a picture as though some anachronism had combined Salvator Rosa with Spagnoletti. Storace, poor fellow, sang the last melancholy breathings of his spirit upon the present occasion, to complete the gloomy work, from which so much was expected. On the 12th of March it was produced, and found to be heavy, and insufferably long. Every disaster had attended its progress. Its author was too ill to attend its rehearsals; and no body would venture, for him, to cut away those excrescences, which that very useful critic, a stop-watch, must necessarily have pointed In addition to all this, his great actor was himself as ill as the part he played is stated to be; and we all know, that spirits worn down by indisposition are, and must be, unequal to the display of the fierce struggle of the mind forcing an emaciated body into action. It is a call upon the actor for all the energy he can have to be at his command, checked and kept down occasionally by exhaustion and remitting vehemence. I have said this, because it was absurdly enough stated, that Mr. Kemble's own illness assisted him in the just exhibition of Sir Edward Mortimer. As for many reasons, I paid the greatest attention to this performance, I must be allowed to say that, skilful as Mr. Kemble was in lulling and stifling his cough, he was THAT night too ill, to do more than walk through any thing. He ought by no means to have brought out the play, whatever the treasury required. When a crowded audience in full expectation, is teased rather than delighted, it fastens upon a harmless levity, as often as a tiresome solemnity, in the declaration of its displeasure. Old Adam Winterton, a sort of superannuated Vellum, in the Drummer, felt their displeasure on more than one occasion; and though the part was beautifully acted by Dodd, it put the whole play in peril, to produce him on the stage. There was a great deal of very perfect acting in the piece-Wroughton's plain country-gentleman, Fitzharding, was admirable. Bannister's Wilford was full of nature, and at times terrific. Miss Decamp stamped upon Judith an impress, that has lasted in stage prescription, as the only, because true, mode of exhibiting a variety of Amazons, quite unconscious of such an origin. Of the music, the opening glee will not easily be paralleled; and the dialogue and chorus have great merit; but the finale seemed built upon the idea of surrounding seraphs whispering peace to a departing spirit. The author was severely annoyed by the treatment of his play, and wrote a very angry preface, which the good-humoured world valued at a GUINEA! and though it has been long omitted, I should yet be afraid, in a sale-room, to mark the comparative prices of the Iron Chest with the bloody knife of the author's vengeance, and of one without it. Among the very usual things in this play is a passage describing some of the antiquarian pursuits, which were attributed commonly to the great actor: the anticipated application of them, I fancy, diverted the author too much to allow him to question their delicacy or wisdom. "Edward is all deap reading, and black letter; Scarce and curious' Are baits his learning nibbles at. His brain The object of all this is not in the play. Mortimer is no such person. The "black-letter" was in daily use in his time and long after. The "scarce and curious," too, of the library wanted TIME, to become "baits for learning to nibble at." It is obvious modern satire, and, were it stands, is an anachronism. I heard this, at the time, from one person interested in the play; but it was certainly not Mr. Kemble; who I verily believe, would have spoken the lines, had he found them in his part, so perfectly insensible was he to what the multitude might think of him or his pursuits. With a very sincere regard for both these gentlemen, I yet determined, that it would be unmanly to avoid the subject altogether. Mr. Kemble never replied to the preface himself; there were, perhrps, too many, eager to thurst themselves into the order, which the French, with characteristic equivocation, call avocats officieux. Mr. Colman brought out his play at the little theatre, and certainly established there, that the most vigorous health was required to sustain the almoat infernal agonies of the hero. Never did any actor in my time make such dreadful exertions as were made by Elliston, then in the vigour of his youth, and in the command of a voice unequalled, perhaps in power. I remember well the effects he produced; he will forgive me, but the melancholy shade of original greatness was not there; the fiendlike composure of calculated falsehood, and the internal struggles of not quite annihilated principle, were not to be seen, as a palsy upon the countenance, that should have awed by purity and beauty. No; these were only to be found in the art, or wonderful expression of Kemble. So identified, I may say, was he with Sir Edward Mortimer, that, if his voice had utterly failed him, and he had been merely able to act and look the part, he would have conveyed a more graphic exhibition of it, than all the actors from 1796 to the present hour have been able to supply. But it was quite impossible for the play to recover itself at Drury Lane Theatre. Some years elapsed, I believe, without the least approach of the parties to reconciliation; and Mr. Kemble himself told me, that such a thing was impossible, and I must leave it where it stood: however, to Lord Mulgrave and to Frank North, he at last yielded up the point; the parties met, "wine exerted its natural power upon dramatic as well as other kings;" and he, I am quite sure, excused what was too gross in the attack, and at all events unjust to his talents, by considering the usual irritability of authors, and the absolute injury of his own unlucky indisposition. Mr. Kemble knew, too, that he had really taken very great pains in the preparations for this play, and studiously decorated it with all the truth of scenery that the studies of Capon could supply. It would be folly to ascribe those aids to any other taste or zeal than those of Mr. Kemble. The artist invariably worked by his instruction. For Vortigern, let me say, he only altered two scenes. For the Iron Chest, he executed an ancient baronial hall, the architecture of the times of Edward IV. and Henry VI. The library of Sir Edward Mortimer, from the most perfect specimens of the Gothic in existence. The vaulting of the groined ceiling, taken from a part of the beautiful clositer of the monks of St. Stephen, Westminster; the very book-cases had similar antiquity and beauty. CHAP. IX. Mr. Kemble in Vortigern.--Shakspeare papers.-Some naturally expected.-At length stated to be discovered.-Terms as to Vortigern.-Mr. Kemble's opinion.-Sheridan's.Ireland's hand-bill.-Vortigern, how cast.-Speech in it. Consequences.--Candid remark as to the author.-Lord Southampton's Autograph. WHILE Mr. Kemble thus suffered in the opinion of an able man from his indisposition, during the first night's performance of the Iron Chest, he was shortly after to bear from an impudent one, the imputation of having played the critic, when he should have acted Vortigern, and by downright treachery producing the damnation of Shakspeare himself. For many reasons the reader will require an account of this affair from ME; and the transaction is of too much moment to be slightly handled in any work that embraces the business of the stage. I shall, therefore, preserve all that is material in an attempt to palm a series of forgeries for the genuine writings of Shakspeare; and show how much probability aided the contrivers of the papers in the sacrilegious imposition, which would have placed the tragedy of Vortigern among the works of our greatest poet. It was a subject of infinite surprise to the admirers of Shakspeare's genus, to observe from age to age, that while discoveries, very material to our knowledge of the period in which he lived, occasionally occupied the press, yet that with respect to himself little could be known; and all the effusions that friendship or business must have poured from his pen during a town life, and the reasonable produce of his retirement from a mind so essentially active, ALL, as if collected together in one mass destroyed BY AUTHORITY, had vanished away, and were entirely lost to posterity. This wonder was increased by our knowledge, that he had neither lived in obscurity nor died in want, but that the general love and admiration had constantly surrounded him; and that individual importance might best indulge its vanity by showing the communications of his esteem, or the private treasures that might remain with his family, of which there was a natural and even learned guardian in his son-in-law, Dr. Hall. Family papers have become a very interesting and valuable feature in our literary stores. In none such is there any fragment of Shakspeare. He had been patronised by Elizabeth and James, by Essex, and Southampton, and the two Pembrokes; had lived in the closest intimacy with Jonson and his friends; and yet not a single letter can be found subscribed with his name, nor one tributary effusion of his muse to show that he ever yielded to the NOT idle habit of congratulating success, and soothing the disappointment sometimes of cotemporary genius. Every probability, therefore, drew the conclusion, that the task of collection had by some affectionate hand been duly made; and that, perhaps, in our time a rich assemblage of Shakspeare papers would start forth from some ancient repository, to solve all our doubts, and add to our reverence and our enjoyment. In this state of very reasonable expectation, the public is at length gratified to learn, that this precious repository has at last been found; that it contains a miscellany as rich and various as his genius-now sublime, now sportive; now dramatic, now critical-relics even of his person and his dresshis hair, his rings, his portrait, and his books, and plays of which the number was not at once ascertained; BUT a tragedy, called Vortigern, was certainly there, perfect and excellent, as the great national theatre would shortly feel by the immense audiences it would be sure to collect, when acted by so accomplished a company as was now under the management of Mr. Kemble. The terms agreed upon between Sheridan and Richardson on the one part, and the father, Ireland, for the son, then a minor, on the other, were that £300 should be paid down; or, in the Drury Lane mode, notes given at short periods, payable at Hammersley's; and this sum was, at all events, got by the forgery. The other part of the agreement was a division of the receipts (after deducting charges) for sixty nights! None of the parties seemed to entertain the slightest suspicion, that the piece might fail. Mr. Ireland, in his Confessions, has reported that Sheridan was by no means an enthusiast as to Shakspeare; yet that, upon reading a few pages of the manuscript he was going to buy, he was struck with some unstrung lines, and crude passages, as below the general character of the poet; but, as the inferiority might proceed from his youth, he still relied in the fullest confidence upon the external evidences of paper and ink, and the character of the penmanship. As to Mr. Kemble all this time, his opinion, as one of the |