1868.

AN actor's posthumous fame is, by the nature of his art, visionary and traditional. The sculptor's thought lives after him, in lines and masses of imperishable marble; the painter's in simulated forms and "sorcery of color" on his canvas; and from the impish figures of the composer's score, a cunning hand may at any time evoke

"The hidden soul of harmony."

But when a great actor passes away, nothing remains excepting grand and delicate images, which in silent hours crowd the memory of those who have seen him, and the report of which finds a fainter and still receding echo in the minds of those who have not.

In this view, in grateful testimony to the rare delight his personations have afforded; and in the hope of giving body to the vision, and language to the common sentiment of his appreciators, we proceed to record our impressions of Mr. Booth's genius for dramatic impersonation.

And here we feel we cannot advance one steady step without first considering, and haply disposing of, Charles Lamb's thoughtful essay "On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, considered in their fitness for stage representation"; in which he evinces the most penetrating sentiment of the quality of Shakespeare's genius, and denies with equal emphasis, but less discretion, the power of the stage to reproduce it. The sophistry of his argument, as we apprehend it, lies in his applying to Shakespeare's dramas the most subtle imaginative tests, and thereupon assuming the entire absence of the imaginative faculty in the representation of those dramas on the stage. Let us review his theory; for if Shakespeare cannot be represented, it is idle to assign the quality of genius to any actor.

Lamb tells us that, as he was taking a turn in Westminster Abbey, he was struck by an affected figure of Garrick, the player, underwrit by some fustian lines about the equality of genius between Garrick and Shakespeare! Scarcely need we affirm our sympathy with Lamb's condemnation of their "false thoughts and nonsense." They contain sufficient provocation to set off the ec

centric genius of Elia at a smart pace in the opposite direction.

We can follow him in his lucid exposition of the inadequacy of the stage to represent supernatural scenery; and the consequent failure of all attempts to reproduce the fairy creations of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and "The Tempest.' These require for

their due appreciation, an imagination subtilized by quiet, and airily abstracted from the presence of material objects.

But when he proceeds to distinguish the stage as equally incapable of embodying single human characters, in which the imagination plays a conspicuous part; or who are possessed by supernatural emotions, as Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, then we part company with the ingenious essayist. The possibility of their adequate representation by living man is involved in the fact of their creation within the sphere of humanity.

No doubt, Lamb's sensitive spirit, developed and nourished in the morning light and dew and fragrance of the English classics, was often shocked by pretenders to the much-abused and misjudged fine art of acting that swarmed the London theatres. Even

Edmund Kean, no pretender, but an original and genuine artist, may have swelled the current of this feeling.

Hazlitt cherished a passionate admiration for Kean; but he was a jealous lover, and frequently chastised his favorite. Kean disappointed him in Lear. The critic quotes the passage,

"O heavens,

If you do love old men, if your sweet sway

Hallow obedience, if yourselves are old,

Make it your cause; send down, and take my part!
Art not ashamed to look upon this beard?

O Regan, wilt thou take her by the hand?"

and adds, "One would think there are tones and looks and gestures answerable to these words, to thrill and harrow up the thoughts, to 'appall the guilty and make mad the free'; or that might create a soul under the ribs of death! But we did not see or hear them. It is not enough that Lear's crosses and perplexities are expressed by single strokes."

Lamb retorts, "What have looks and tones to do with that sublime identification of his age with that of the heavens themselves, when, in his reproaches to them, for conniving at the injustice of his children, he reminds them that they themselves are old" "?

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Lamb enforces his abstract point by italicizing the word "heavens." But the attentive reader of the play will see that Lear, the grand old pagan king, uses this word interchangeably with "gods"- the gods were persons if the heavens are not.

The respective printed articles in which these opposing views occur, are the evident outcome of a foregone conversation. We can fancy Hazlitt coming, on a Wednesday evening, hot from the theatre, into that congress of wits and good fellows then assembled at Lamb's lodgings; uttering and controverting opinion, with fierce and fitful eloquence; then disappearing, in order to write one of those papers on Kean's performances, which was to lighten from his firefly page, on the dull world of London, in the "Chronicle " of the following day.

Lamb might have added, and with equal pertinency, to his question about looks and tones, what have words to do with that sublime identification? Words are arbitrary signs. Tone is their living spirit. Tone is

the direct utterance of the heart and the imagination. We hold with Hazlitt. We have heard tones equal to the expression of