comes in, and Sir Edward turns to Wilford, fixing him with magnetic glance, and utters the parting admonition

"I shall be angry,

Be very angry if I find you-careless,"

the reiterated word, given in prolonged and kindling tones, carried also a flush of feeling visibly into his face. In a former scene, where he seizes Wilford, and cries out

"Slave! I will crush thee! pulverize thy frame,
That no vile particle of prying nature

May

O, agony!"

ha! ha! ha! I will not harm thee, boy,

and rushes from the scene, the gust of anger gathers and spends itself without change of color; but the sudden revulsion of feeling that takes place with the words

"I will not harm thee, boy,"

crimsons his face and neck with burning shame. His ghastly pallor in the death scene shall conclude this episode on color. In a word, he commanded his own pulses, as well as the pulses of his auditors, with despotic ease.

John Howard Payne, in a published criticism on Booth's Mortimer, speaks happily of the "manual eloquence " he exhibited. The

beauty of this hand-play, shone throughout the drama, above the terror of the representation. The indescribable motion of both hands towards those heart-wounds

"Too tender e'en for tenderness to touch;

the creeping, trembling play of his pale, thin fingers over his maddening brain; and his action when describing the assassination, may serve as examples.

A melancholy interest attaches to this part, in view of the fact that it was the last character in which Mr. Booth ever appeared.

BRUTUS.

MR. BOOTH was never the literary fashion. He came unheralded, and without letters. He was obliged to introduce himself to the manager of the Richmond theatre, on the occasion of his first performance in this country. He came to Boston and appeared in Colman's play called the "Mountaineers,' "Octavian by Mr. Booth " to a moderate house. But the fire took, and the next day the town was ablaze with interest in the new

tragedian - an interest that scarcely flagged during the following thirty years.

It was the native whim of this monarch of tragedy, to go about incognito; to mix with the people; to play at second-rate theatres. The reward he got, beside that richest and ever sure reward which the artist enjoys in the excellence of his work, was a fullness and heartiness of popular appreciation which our actor felt was infinitely better than the cool approval of scholars. He avoided the listless and fashionable audiences, with the blue blood

sleeping in their veins, and who go to the theatre for idle pastime. He turned with joy to crowded audiences of the people with the red blood leaping in their arteries, who went to the theatre to see the play, and him in it ; and whom he melted by the pathos, or raised by the grandeur, or charmed by the beauty of his impersonations. If the exclusive, of nice culture, excluded himself from these impersonations, on account of the place in which they shone, or the company who enjoyed their light, then the loss was irreparably his.

The current of our remark brings us to the littleEagle," a theatre in Boston, about as large as the "Globe" theatre in London in which Shakespeare had a share, and in which Shakespeare played. Good society shunned the "Globe." There is no evidence that Lord Bacon

Large-browed Verulam,"

ever set foot in it. When Shakespeare's company played before the Queen, it was at the palace, and not at the play-house. The "Globe was not fashionable. Neither was the "Eagle." A few gray heads, whose hearts continued warm; a few critical brains;

a few enthusiastic youths; and the remainder of the little cockpit was filled up by that crowd which the seething city spills after nightfall into its places of amusement. Bounded in that nutshell, Hamlet became king of the infinite spaces of thought; Richard found "ample room and verge enough for his vast ambition; and there took place the most intense and memorable representation of John Howard Payne's tragedy of ́ Brutus, or the Roman Father.

The playwright found rich material for his work in history and in literature. Junius Brutus, a supposed fool, but hiding his wit through policy, hears from Sextus Tarquin his confession of the ravishment of Lucretia ; and breaks out upon him in a speech of fiery indignation. Throwing aside the mask of folly, Brutus incites his countrymen to revenge, and to the extirpation of the Tarquins. He is clothed with civil and military power, and vanquishes the enemy. But his own son, fighting on the side of Tarquin, is taken prisoner. Here centres the chief and closing interest of the play, in the struggle between the duty of the magistrate, and the feelings of the father. In this struggle the Roman