XXV.

"Come, pleasing rest! eternal slumber fall!Seal mine, that once must seal the eyes of all!Calm and composed my soul her journey takes;No guilt that troubles and no heart that aches."

Such is the story of Eugene Aram—a story that has furnished the basis of various fictions, notably of Bulwer's famous novel, and which inspired one of the best of the beautiful poems of Thomas Hood. Wills gathered hints from it, here and there, in the making of his play; but he boldly departed from its more hideous and repulsive incidents and from the theory of the main character that might perhaps be justified by its drift. In the construction of the piece Henry Irving made many material suggestions. The treatment of the character of Aram was devised by him, and the management of the close of the second act denotes his felicity of invention.

The play opens in the rose-garden of a rural rectory in the sweet, green valley of the shining Nidd. The time is twilight; the season summer; and here, in a haven of peace and love, the repentant murderer has found a refuge. Many years havepassed since the commission of his crime, and all those years he has lived a good life, devoted to study, instruction, and works of benevolence. He has been a teacher of the young, a helper of the poor, and he has gained respect, affection, and honourable repute. He is safe in the security of silence and in the calm self-poise of his adamantine will. His awful secret sleeps in his bosom and is at rest forever. He has suffered much and he still suffers; yet, lulled into a false security by the uneventful lapse of years and by that drifting, desolate, apathetic recklessness which is sequent on the subsiding storm of passionate sorrow, he has allowed himself to accept a woman's love and to love her in return, and half to believe that his long misery has expiated his sin and that even for him there may be a little happiness yet possible on earth. Eugene Aram, the village school-master, and Ruth Meadows, the vicar's daughter, are betrothed lovers; and now, on the eve of their wedding morning, they stand together among the roses, while the sun is going down and the sweet summer wind plays softly in the leaves, and from the little gray church close by a solemn strain of music—the vesper hymn—floatsout upon the stillness of the darkening day. The woman is all happiness, confidence, and hope; the man, seared and blighted by conscious sin and subdued by long years of patient submission to the sense of his own unworthiness, is all gentleness, solicitude, reverence, and sorrow. At this supreme moment, when now it seems that everything is surely well, the one man in the world who knows Eugene Aram's secret has become, by seeming chance, a guest in the vicarage; and even while Ruth places her hand upon her lover's heart and softly whispers, "If guilt were there, it still should be my pillow," the shadow of the gathering night that darkens around them is deepened by the blacker shadow of impending doom. The first act of the play is simply a picture. It involves no action. It only introduces the several persons who are implicated in the experience to be displayed, denotes their relationship to one another, and reveals a condition of feeling and circumstance which is alike romantic, pathetic, and perilous, and which is soon to be shattered by the disclosure of a fatal secret. The act is a preparation for a catastrophe.

In the second act the opposed characters clash: the movement begins, and the catastrophe is precipitated. The story opens at nightfall, proceeds the same evening, and ends at the dawn of the ensuing day. The scene of act second is a room in the vicarage. Aram and Parson Meadows are playing chess, and Ruth is hovering about them and roguishly impeding their play. The purpose accomplished here is the exhibition of domestic comfort and content, and this is further emphasised by Ruth's recital of a written tribute that Aram's pupils have sent to him, on the eve of his marriage. Wounded by this praise the conscience-stricken wretch breaks off abruptly from his pastime and rushes from the room—an act of desperate grief which is attributed to his modesty. The parson soon follows, and Ruth is left alone. Houseman, their casual guest, having accepted the vicar's hospitable offer of a shelter for the night, has now a talk with Ruth, and he is startled to hear the name of Eugene Aram, and thus to know that he has found the man whose fatal secret he possesses, and upon whose assumed dread of exposure his cupidity now purposes to feed. In a coarsely jocular way this brutish creature provokes the indignant resentmentof Ruth, by insinuations as to her betrothed lover's past life; and when, a little later, Ruth and Aram again meet, she wooingly begs him to tell her of any secret trouble that may be weighing upon his mind. At this moment Houseman comes upon them, and utters Aram's name. From that point to the end of the act there is a sustained and sinewy exposition, strong in spirit and thrilling in suspense,—of keen intellect and resolute will standing at bay and making their last battle for life, against the overwhelming odds of heaven's appointed doom. Aram defies Houseman and is denounced by him; but the ready adroitness and iron composure of the suffering wretch still give him supremacy over his foe—till, suddenly, the discovery is announced of the bones of Daniel Clarke in St. Robert's Cave, and the vicar commands Aram and Houseman to join him in their inspection. Here the murderer suffers a collapse. There has been a greater strain than even he can bear; and, left alone upon the scene, he stands petrified with horror, seeming, in an ecstasy of nameless fear, to look upon the spectre of his victim. Henry Irving's management of the apparition effect was such as is possible only to a man of genius, andsuch as words may record but never can describe.

The third act passes in the churchyard. Aram has fled from the sight of the skeleton, and has fallen among the graves. It is almost morning. The ghastly place is silent and dark. The spirit of the murderer is broken, and his enfeebled body, long since undermined by the grief of remorse and now chilled by the night dews, is in the throes of death. The incidents of the closing scene are simple, but they are heart-breaking in their pathos and awful in their desolation. The fugitive Houseman finds Aram here, and spurns him as a whimpering lunatic. Then, in this midnight hour and this appalling place, alone in the presence of God, the murderer lifts his hands toward heaven, confesses his crime, and falls at the foot of the cross. Here Ruth finds him, and to her, with dying lips, he tells the story of the murder and of all that he has since endured. And just as his voice falters into silence and his heart ceases to beat, the diamond light of morning gleams in the eastern sky and the glad music of an anthem floats softly from the neighbouring church. Upon that beautifully significant picture the final curtain fell.

Wills's literary framework for the display of character and experience is scarcely to be considered a perfect play. It begins by assuming on the part of its auditor a knowledge of the mystery upon which it is based. Such a knowledge the auditor ought certainly to have, but in presence of an exact drama he derives it from what he sees and not from remembrance of what he has read. The piece is, perhaps, somewhat irrational in making Aram a resident, under his own name, of the actual neighbourhood of his crime. It lowers the assumed nobility of his character, furthermore, by making this remorseful and constantly apprehensive murderer willing to yoke a sweet, innocent, and idolised woman to misery and shame by making her his wife. And it mars its most pathetic scene—the awful scene of the midnight confession in the churchyard—by making Eugene Aram declare, to the woman of his love, the one human being who comforts and sustains him on the brink of eternity, that he has loved another woman for whose sake he did the murder. Since the whole story was to be treated in a fanciful manner, a still wider license in the play of fancy would, perhaps, have had a moreentirely gracious and satisfying effect. The language is partly blank verse and partly prose; and, while its tissue is rightly and skilfully diversified by judicious allowance for the effect of each character upon the garment of individual diction, and while its strain, here and there, rises to eloquence of feeling and beauty of imagery, there is a certain lack of firmness in its verbal fibre. The confession speech that has to be spoken by Aram comprises upward of ninety lines—and that is a severe and perilous strain upon an actor's power of holding the public interest. The beauties of the play, however, are many and strong. Its crowning excellence is that it gives dramatic permanence to a strangely interesting character.

The knowledge of human nature that Henry Irving revealed in this part and the manner in which he revealed it were nothing less than wonderful. The moment he walked upon the scene you saw the blighted figure of a man who has endured, and is enduring, spiritual torment. The whole personality was suffused with a mournful strangeness. The man was isolated and alone. It was a purely ideal view of the character thatthe actor denoted; for he made Eugene Aram a noble, tender, gentle person, whom ungovernable passion, under circumstances of overwhelming provocation, had once impelled to an act of half-justifiable homicide, and who had for years been slowly dying with remorse. He touched no chord of terror, but only the chord of pity. Like his portrayal of Mathias, the picture showed the reactionary effect of hidden sin in the human soul; but the personality of the sufferer was entirely different. Each of those men has had experience of crime and of resultant misery, but no two embodiments could possibly be more dissimilar, alike in spiritual quality and in circumstances. Mathias is dominated by paternal love and characterised by a half-defiant, ever-vigilant, and often self-approbative pride of intellect, in being able to guard and keep a terrible and dangerous secret. Eugene Aram is dominated by a saint-like tenderness toward a sweet woman who loves him, and characterised by a profound, fitful melancholy, now humble and submissive, now actively apprehensive and almost frenzied. Only once does he stand at bay and front his destiny with a defiance of desperate will; and even then it is forthe woman's sake rather than for his own. Henry Irving's acting made clear and beautiful that condition of temperament. A noble and affectionate nature, shipwrecked, going to pieces, doomed, but making one last tremendous though futile effort to avert the final and inevitable ruin—this ideal was made actual in his performance. The intellectual or spiritual value of such a presentment must depend upon the auditor's capacity to absorb from a tragedy its lessons of insight into the relations of the human soul to the moral government of the world. Many spectators would find it merely morbid and gloomy; others would find it superlatively illuminative and eloquent. Its artistic value the actor himself made evident to every comprehension. There is a moment of the performance when the originally massive and passionate character of Eugene Aram is suddenly asserted above his meekness, contrition, and sorrow; when, at the sound of his enemy's voice, he first becomes petrified with the sense of peril, and then calmly gathers all his powers to meet and conquer the danger. The splendid concentration, the perfect poise, the sustained intensity, the copious and amazingvariety and force of emotion, and the positive, unerring, and brilliant art with which Henry Irving met that emergency and displayed that frightful and piteous aspect of assailed humanity, desperate and fighting for life, made up such an image of genius as seldom is seen and never will be forgotten. Rapid transition has ever been one of the commonest and most effective expedients used in histrionic art. This, on the contrary, was an example of sustained, prolonged, cumulative, artistic expression of the most harrowing and awful emotions with which the human soul can be convulsed; and it was a wonder of consummate acting. The same thoroughness of identification and the same astonishing adequacy of feeling pervaded the scene in the churchyard. At first, in the dusky starlight, only a shapeless figure, covered with a black cloak, was seen among the gravestones, crouched upon a tomb; but the man that rose, as if out of the grave, pallid, emaciated, ghastly, the spectre of himself, was the authentic image of majestic despair, not less sublime than pitiable, and fraught with a power that happiness could never attain. Not in our time upon the stage has such a lesson been taught,with such overwhelming pathos, of the utter helplessness of even the strongest human will, when once the soul has been vitiated by sin and the eternal law of right defied by mortal passion. In the supplication to his astonished accomplice the actor seemed like one transfigured, and there the haunted effect was extremely awful.

In old times Charles Fisher often figured in the old comedies, and he was one of the last of the thin and rapidly lessening group of actors capable of presenting those pieces—wherein, although the substance be human nature, the manner is that of elaborate and diversified artifice. When he played Lieutenant Worthington, inThe Poor Gentleman, he was a gentleman indeed—refined, delicate, sensitive, simply courageous, sustained by native integrity, and impressive with a dignity of manner that reflected the essential nobility of his mind; so that when he mistook Sir Robert Bramble for a bailiff, and roused that benevolent baronet's astonishment and rage, he brought forth all the comic humour of a delightful situation with the greatest ease and nature. He played Littleton Coke, Sir Harcourt Courtly, old Laroque—in which he gave a wonderful picture of the workingof remorse in the frail and failing brain of age—and Nicholas Rue, inSecrets worth Knowing, a sinister and thrilling embodiment of avarice and dotage. He played Dr. Bland, the elegant medical cynic ofNos Intimes; De la Tour, the formidable, jealous husband of Henriette, inLe Patte de Mouche; Horace, inThe Country Squire; Goldfinch, in which he was airy, sagacious, dashing, and superb, inThe Road to Ruin; and Captain Cozzens, the nonchalant rascal ofThe Knights of the Round Table, which he embodied in a style of easy magnificence, gay, gallant, courageous, alert, imperturbable, and immensely comic. He was the original Matthew Leigh in Lester Wallack's romantic play ofRosedale(1863). He acted Joseph Surface in the days when Lester Wallack used to play Charles, and he always held his own in that superior part. He was equally fine in Sir Peter and Sir Oliver. When the good old play ofThe Wife's Secretwas revived in New York, in 1864, he gave a dignified and impetuous performance of Sir Walter Amyott. I remember him in those parts, with equal wonder at his comprehensive variety of talent and admiration for his always adequate skill. I saw him as thevolatile Ferment, inThe School of Reform, and nothing could be more comic than his unwitting abuse of General Tarragon, in that blustering officer's presence, or his equally ludicrous scene of cross purposes with Bob Tyke. He was a perfect type, as Don Manuel Velasco, inThe Compact, of the gallant, stately Spanish aristocrat. He excelled competition when, in a company that included George Holland, W. Holston, A.W. Young, Mark Smith, Frederick C.P. Robinson, and John Gilbert, he enacted the convict inNever Too Late to Mend. He was equally at home whether as the King inDon Cæsar de Bazanor as Tom Stylus the literary hack, inSociety. He passed easily from the correct and sentimental Sir Thomas Clifford, ofThe Hunchback, to the frivolous Mr. Willowear, ofTo Marry or Not to Marry. No one could better express than he did, when playing Wellborn, both pride of birth and pride of character. One of his most characteristic works was Hyssop, inThe Rent Day. His scope and the rich resources of his experience are denoted in those citations. It is no common artist who can create and sustain a perfect illusion, and please an audience equally well, whether in such a partas Gilbert Featherstone, the villain, inLost in London, or old Baptista, inThe Taming of the Shrew. The playgoer who never saw Charles Fisher as Triplet can scarcely claim that he ever saw the part at all. The quaint figure, the well-saved but threadbare dress, the forlorn air of poverty and suffering commingled with a certain jauntiness and pluck, the profound feeling, the unconscious sweetness and humour, the spirit of mind, gentility, and refinement struggling through the confirmed wretchedness of the almost heart-broken hack—who that ever laughed and wept at sight of him in the garret scene, sitting down, "all joy and hilarity," to write his comedy, can ever forget those details of a true and touching embodiment? His fine skill in playing the violin was touchingly displayed in that part, and gave it an additional tone of reality. I once saw him acting Mercutio, and very admirable he was in the guise of that noble, brave, frolicsome, impetuous young gentleman. The intense vitality, the glancing glee, the intrepid spirit—all were preserved; and the brilliant text was spoken with faultless fluency. It is difficult to realise that the same actor who set before us that perfect image of comicperplexity, the bland and benevolent Dean, inDandy Dick, could ever have been the bantering companion of Romeo and truculent adversary of fiery Tybalt. Yet this contrast but faintly indicates the versatile character of his mind. Fisher was upon the American stage for thirty-eight years, from August 30, 1852, when he came forth at Burton's theatre as Ferment. Later he went to Wallack's, and in 1872 he joined Daly's company, in which he remained till 1890. It may be conjectured that in some respects he resembled that fine comedian Thomas Dogget, to whom Sir Godfrey Kneller, the painter, said, "I can only copy Nature from the originals before me, while you vary them at pleasure and yet preserve the likeness." Like Dogget he played, in a vein of rich, hearty, jocose humour, and with great breadth of effect and excellent colour, the sailor Ben, inLove for Love. The resemblance was in mental characteristics, not physique—for Dogget was a slight and sprightly man, whereas Fisher could represent majesty as well as frolic. After he went to Daly's theatre he manifested a surprising range of faculty. He first appeared there on October 28, 1872, as Mr. Dornton, inThe Road to Ruin, and on November 19, following, he acted Falstaff for the first time. He presented there the other Shakespearean parts of Leonatus, Armado, and Malvolio—the last of these being a model of fidelity to the poet, and now a classic in reputation. He also assumed Adam and Jaques. He presented the living image of Shakespeare himself, inYorick, and his large, broad, stately style gave weight to Don Manuel, inShe Would and She Wouldn't; to that apt type of the refined British aristocrat, Sir Geoffrey Champneys, inOur Boys; and to many a noble father or benevolent uncle of the adapted French society drama. Just as Dogget was supreme in such parts as Fondlewife, so was Fisher superb in the uxorious husband whom the demure child-wife bamboozles, in the comedies of Molière. No man has ever better depicted than he did a sweet nature shocked by calamity and bowed down with grief, or, as in Joe Chirrup, inElfie, manliness chastened by affliction and ennobled by true love: yet his impersonation of Fagin was only second to that of J.W. Wallack, Jr.; his Moody, inThe Country Girl, was almost tragic in its grim and grizzled wretchedness andsnarling wrath; and I have seen him assume to perfection the gaunt figure and crazy mood of Noah Learoyd, inThe Long Strike, and make that personality a terrible embodiment of menace. From the time he first acted the comic Major Vavasour, inHenry Dunbar, no actor of equal quaintness has trod our stage. He died on June 11, 1891, and was buried at Woodlawn.

Students of the English stage find in books on that subject abundant information about the tragedy queens of the early drama, and much likewise, though naturally somewhat less (because comedy is more difficult to discuss than tragedy), about the comedy queens. Mrs. Cibber still discomfits the melting Mrs. Porter by a tenderness even greater than the best of Belvideras could dispense. Mrs. Bracegirdle and Mrs. Oldfield still stand confronted on the historic page, and still their battle continues year after year. All readers know the sleepy voice and horrid sigh of Mrs. Pritchard in Lady Macbeth's awful scene of haunted somnambulism; the unexampled and unexcelled grandeur of Mrs. Yates in Medea; the infinite pathos of Mrs. Dancer (she that became in succession Mrs. Spranger Barry and Mrs. Crawford) and her memorable scream, as Lady Randolph, at "Was he alive?"; the comparative discomfiture of both those ladies by Mrs. Siddons, with her wonderful, wailing cry, as Isabella, "O, my Biron, my Biron," her overwhelming Lady Macbeth and her imperial Queen Katharine. The brilliant story of Peg Woffington and the sad fate of Mrs. Robinson, the triumphant career of Mrs. Abington and the melancholy collapse of Mrs. Jordan—all those things, and many more, are duly set down in the chronicles. But the books are comparatively silent about the Old Women of the stage—an artistic line no less delightful than useful, of which Mrs. G.H. Gilbert is a sterling and brilliant representative. Mrs. Jefferson, the great-grandmother of the comedian Joseph Jefferson, who died of laughter, on the stage (1766-68), might fitly be mentioned as the dramatic ancestor of such actresses as Mrs. Gilbert. She was a woman of great loveliness of character and of great talent for the portrayal of "old women," and likewise of certain "old men" in comedy. "She had," says Tate Wilkinson, "one of the best dispositions that ever harboured in a human breast"; and he adds that "she was one of the most elegant women ever beheld." Mrs. Gilberthas always suggested that image of grace, goodness, and piquant ability. Mrs. Vernon was the best in this line until Mrs. Gilbert came; and the period which has seen Mrs. Judah, Mrs. Vincent, Mrs. Germon, Mary Carr, Mrs. Chippendale, Mrs. Stirling, Mrs. Billington, Mrs. Drew, Mrs. Phillips, and Madam Ponisi, has seen no superior to Mrs. Gilbert in her special walk. She was in youth a beautiful dancer, and all her motions have spontaneous ease and grace. She can assume the fine lady, without for an instant suggesting the parvenu. She is equally good, whether as the formal and severe matron of starched domestic life, or the genial dame of the pantry. She could play Temperance inThe Country Squire, and equally she could play Mrs. Jellaby. All varieties of the eccentricity of elderly women, whether serious or comic, are easily within her grasp. Betsy Trotwood, embodied by her, becomes a living reality; while on the other hand she suffused with a sinister horror her stealthy, gliding, uncanny personation of the dumb, half-insane Hester Dethridge. That was the first great success that Mrs. Gilbert gained, under Augustin Daly's management. She has been associated with Daly's companysince his opening night as a manager, August 16, 1869, when, at the Fifth Avenue theatre, then in Twenty-fourth Street, she took part in Robertson's comedy ofPlay. The first time I ever saw her she was acting the Marquise de St. Maur, inCaste, on the night of its first production in America, August 5, 1867, at the Broadway theatre, the house near the southwest corner of Broadway and Broome Street, that had been Wallack's but now was managed by Barney Williams. The assumption of that character, perfect in every particular, was instinct with pure aristocracy; but while brilliant with serious ability it gave not the least hint of those rich resources of humour that since have diffused so much innocent pleasure. Most of her successes have been gained as the formidable lady who typifies in comedy the domestic proprieties and the Nemesis of respectability. It was her refined and severely correct demeanour that gave soul and wings to the wild fun ofA Night Off. From Miss Garth to Mrs. Laburnum is a far stretch of imitative talent for the interpretation of the woman nature that everybody, from Shakespeare down, has found it so difficult to treat. This actress has never failed toimpress the spectator by her clear-cut, brilliant identification with every type of character that she has assumed; and, back of this, she has denoted a kind heart and a sweet and gentle yet never insipid temperament—the condition of goodness, sympathy, graciousness, and cheer that is the flower of a fine nature and a good life. Scenes in which Mrs. Gilbert and Charles Fisher or James Lewis have participated, as old married people, on Daly's stage, will long be remembered for their intrinsic beauty—suggestive of the touching lines:

"And when with envy Time, transported,Shall think to rob us of our joys,You'll in your girls again be courted,And I'll go wooing with my boys."

A prominent representative type of character is "the humorous man," and that is Shakespeare's phrase to describe him. Wit is a faculty; humour an attribute. Joseph Addison, Laurence Sterne, Washington Irving—whatever else they might have been they were humourists. Sir Roger de Coverley, Tristram Shandy, Uncle Toby, Diedrich Knickerbocker, Ichabod Crane—these and other creations of their genius stand forth upon their pages to exemplify that aspect of their minds. But the humourist of the pen may, personally, be no humourist at all. Addison's character was austere. Irving, though sometimes gently playful, was essentially grave and decorous.

Comical quality in the humorous man whom nature destines for the stage must be personal. His coming brings with it a sense of comfort. His presence warms theheart and cheers the mind. The sound of his voice, "speaking oft," before he emerges upon the scene, will set the theatre in a roar. This was notably true of Burton and of William Warren. The glance, motion, carriage, manner, and the pause and stillness of such a man, instil merriment. Cibber says that Robert Nokes had a palpable simplicity of nature which was often as unaccountably diverting in his common speech as on the stage, John E. Owens, describing the conduct of a big bee in an empty molasses barrel, once threw a circle of his hearers, of whom I was one, almost into convulsions of laughter. Artemas Ward made people laugh the moment they beheld him, by his wooden composure and indescribable sapience of demeanour. The lamented Daniel E. Setchell, a comedian who would have been as famous as he was funny had he but lived longer, presented a delightful example of spontaneous humour. It is ludicrous to recall the simple gravity, not demure but perfectly solemn, with which, on the deck of a Hudson River steamboat, as we were passing West Point, he indicated to me the Kosciuszko monument, saying briefly, "That's the place where Freedom shrieked." It wasthe quality of his temperament that made his playfulness delicious. Setchell was the mental descendant of Burton, as Burton was of Reeve and as Reeve was of Liston. Actors illustrate a kind of heredity. Each species is distinct and discernible. Lester Wallack maintained the lineage of Charles Kemble, William Lewis, Elliston, and Mountfort—a line in which John Drew has gained auspicious distinction. John Gilbert's artistic ancestry could be traced back through Farren and Munden to King and Quin, and perhaps still further, to Lowin and Kempe.

The comedian intrinsically comical, while in his characteristic quality eccentric and dry, has been exemplified by Fawcett, Blisset, Finn, and Barnes, and is conspicuously presented by James Lewis. No one ever saw him without laughter—and it is kindly laughter, with a warm heart behind it. The moment he comes upon the stage an eager gladness diffuses itself throughout the house. His refined quaintness and unconscious drollery capture all hearts. His whimsical individuality never varies; yet every character of the many that he has portrayed stands clearly forth among its companions, a distinct, unique embodiment. The graceful urbanity, the elaborate yet naturalmanner, the brisk vitality, the humorous sapience of Sir Patrick Lundy—how completely and admirably he expressed them! How distinct that fine old figure is in the remembrance of all who saw it! But he has never played a part that he did not make equally distinct. A painter might fill a gallery with odd, characteristic creations by merely copying his compositions of "make-up." The amiable professor inA Night Off, the senile Gunnion inThe Squire, Lissardo inThe Wonder, Grumio inThe Shrew—those and many more he has made his own; while in the actor's province of making comic characters really comical to others there is no artist who better fulfils the sagacious, comprehensive injunction of Munden (imparted to a youthful actor who spoke of being "natural" in order to amuse), "Nature be d——d! Make the people laugh!" That, aside from all subtleties, is not a bad test of the comic faculty, and that test has been met and borne by the acting of James Lewis.

[November 23, 1867.]

Thirty years hereafter many who are now active and honoured in dramatic life will be at rest—their work concluded, their achievements a fading tradition. But they will not be wholly forgotten. The same talisman of memory that has preserved to our time the names and the deeds of the actors of old will preserve to future times the names and the deeds that are distinguished now in the mimic world of the stage. Legend, speaking in the voice of the veteran devotee of the drama, will say, for example, that of all the actors of this period there was no light comedian comparable with Lester Wallack; that he could thoroughly identify himself with character,—though it did not always please him to do so; that his acting was so imaginative and so earnest as to make reality of the most gossamer fiction; and that hisvivacity—the essential element and the crown of comedy-acting—was like the dew on the opening rose. And therewithal the veteran may quaff his glass to the memory of another member of the Wallack family, and speak of James Wallack as Cassius, and Fagin, and the Man-in-the-Iron-Mask, and the King of the Commons, and may say, with truth, that a more winning embodiment of bluff manliness and humour was never known to our stage than the versatile actor who made himself foremost in those characters. It will be impossible to remember him without recalling his intimate professional associate, Edwin L. Davenport. He was the only Brutus of his time, our old friend will say, and in his prime the best Macbeth on the American stage; and he could play almost any part in the drama, from the loftiest tragedy to mere trash; and he was an admirable artist in all that he did. There will be plenty of evidence to fortify that statement; and if the veteran shall also say that Wallack's company contained, at the same time, the best "old men" in the profession, no dissentient voice, surely, will challenge the names of George Holland, John Gilbert, James H. Stoddart, and Mark Smith.Cibber could play Lord Foppington at seventy-three; but George Holland played Tony Lumpkin at seventy-seven. A young part,—but the old man was as joyous as a boy and filled it with a boisterous, mischievous humour at once delightful and indescribable. You saw him to the best advantage, though, in Mr. Sulky, Humphrey Dobbin, and kindred parts, wherein the fineness of his temperament was veiled under a crabbed exterior and some scope was allowed for his superb skill in painting character. So the discourse will run; and, when it touches upon John Gilbert, what else than this will be its burden?—that he was perfection as the old fop; that his Lord Ogleby had no peer; that he was the oddest conceivable compound of dry humour, quaint manners, frolicsome love of mischief, honest, hearty mirth, manly dignity, and tender pathos. To Mark Smith it will render a kindred tribute. Squire Broadlands, Old Rapid, Sir Oliver Surface—they cannot be forgotten. Extraordinary truthfulness to nature, extraordinary precision of method, large humanity, strong intellect, and refined and delicate humour that always charmed and never offended—those were the qualities that enrolled himamong the best actors of his time. And it will not be strange if Old Mortality passes then into the warmest mood of eulogium, as he strives to recall the admirable, the incomparable "old woman" Mrs. Vernon. She was a worthy mate of those worthies, he will exclaim. She could be the sweet and loving mother, gentle and affectionate; the stately lady, representative of rank and proud of it and true to it; and the most eccentric of ludicrous old fools. She was the ideal Mrs. Malaprop, and she surpassed all competitors in the character of Mrs. Hardcastle. Mary Gannon was her stage-companion and her foil, he will add—the merriest, most mischievous, most bewitching player of her time, in her peculiar line of art. As Hester, inTo Marry or Not to Marry, and as Sophia, inThe Road to Ruin, she was the incarnation of girlish grace and delicious ingenuousness, and also of crisp, well-flavoured mirth. No taint of tameness marred her acting in those kindred characters, and no air of effort made it artificial. Nor was Fanny Morant less remarkable for the glitter of comedy and for an almost matchless precision of method. So will our friend of the future prose on, in a vein that will be tedious enough to matter-of-fact people; but not tedious to gentle spirits who love the stage, and sympathise with its votaries, and keep alive its traditions—knowing that this mimic world is as real and earnest as the strife that roars and surges around it; that there as everywhere else humanity plays out its drama, whereof the moral is always the same—that whether on the stage or in the mart, on the monarch's throne or in the peasant's cot,

"We are such stuffAs dreams are made on, and our little lifeIs rounded with a sleep."

SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND.18mo, Cloth, 75 Cents.

GRAY DAYS AND GOLD.18mo, Cloth, 75 Cents.

SHADOWS OF THE STAGE.18mo, Cloth, 75 Cents.

SHADOWS OF THE STAGE.Second Series.18mo, Cloth, 75 Cents.

OLD SHRINES AND IVY.18mo, Cloth, 75 Cents.

Also a Small LimitedLarge Paper Edition.4 Vols. Uniform. $8.00.

WANDERERS: A Collection of Poems.New Edition. With a Portrait. 18mo, Cloth, 75 Cents.

"The supreme need of this age in America is a practical conviction that progress does not consist in material prosperity, but in spiritual advancement. Utility has long been exclusively worshipped. The welfare of the future lies in the worship of beauty. To that worship these pages are devoted, with all that implies of sympathy with the higher instincts, and faith in the divine destiny of the human race."—From the Preface to Gray Days and Gold.

MACMILLAN & CO.,

66 Fifth Avenue, NEW YORK

New Edition, Revised and Enlarged. With a Portrait of the Author.

18mo, Cloth, 75 Cents.

Also a LimitedLarge Paper Edition, printed on English Hand-made Paper. Price $2.50.

"But it has seemed to the author of these poems—which of course are offered as absolutely impersonal—that they are the expression of various representative moods of human feeling and various representative aspects of human experience, and that therefore they may possibly possess the inherent right to exist."—From the Preface.

"The verse of Mr. Winter is dedicated mainly to love and wine, to flowers and birds and dreams, to the hackneyed and never-to-be-exhausted repertory of the old singers. His instincts are strongly conservative; his confessed aim is to belong to 'that old school of English Lyrical Poetry, of which gentleness is the soul, and simplicity the garment.'"—Saturday Review.

"The poems have a singular charm in their graceful spontaneity."—Scots Observer.

"Free from cant and rant—clear cut as a cameo, pellucid as a mountain brook. It may be derided as trite,borné, unimpassioned; but in its own modest sphere it is, to our thinking, extraordinarily successful, and satisfies us far more than the pretentious mouthing which receives the seal of over-hasty approbation."—Athenæum.

MACMILLAN & CO.,

66 Fifth Avenue, NEW YORK.

18mo, Cloth, 75 Cents.

"The fame of the actor more than that of any other artist is an evanescent one—a 'bubble reputation'—indeed, and necessarily so from the conditions under which his genius is exercised. While the impression it makes is often more vivid and inspiring for the moment than that of the poet and the painter, it vanishes almost with the occasion which gave it birth, and lives only as a tradition in the memory of those to whom it had immediately appealed. 'Shadows they are, and shadows they pursue.'

"The writer, therefore, who, gifted with insight and a poetic enthusiasm which enables him to discern on the one hand the beauties in a dramatic work not perceived by the many, and on the other the qualities in the actor which have made him a true interpreter of the poet's thought, at the same time possessing the faculty of revealing to us felicitously the one, and the other is certainly entitled to our grateful recognition.

"Such a writer is Mr. William Winter, easily the first,—for we know of none other living in this country, or in the England he loves so much, in whose nature the critic's vision is united with that of the poet so harmoniously....

"Over and above all this, there is in these writings the same charm of style, poetic glamour and flavor of personality which distinguish whatever comes to us from Mr. Winter's pen, and which make them unique in our literature."—Home Journal, New York

MACMILLAN & CO.,

66 Fifth Avenue, NEW YORK.

18mo, Cloth, 75 Cents.

SHRINES OF HISTORY.I.Storied Southampton.II.Pageantry and Relics.III.The Shakespeare Church.IV.A Stratford Chronicle.V.From London to Dover.VI.Beauties of France.VII.Ely and its Cathedral.VIII.From Edinburgh to Inverness.IX.The Field of Culloden.X.Stormbound Iona.SHRINES OF LITERATURE.XI.The Forest of Arden: As You Like It.XII.Fairy Land: A Midsummer Night's Dream.XIII.Will o' the Wisp: Love's Labour Lost.XIV.Shakespeare's Shrew.XV.A Mad World: Anthony and Cleopatra.XVI.Sheridan, and the School for Scandal.XVII.Farquhar, and the Inconstant.XVIII.Longfellow.XIX.A Thought on Cooper's Novels.XX.A Man of Letters: John R.G. Hassard.

"Whatever William Winter writes is marked by felicity of diction and by refinement of style, as well as by the evidence of culture and wide reading. 'Old Shrines and Ivy' is an excellent example of the charm of his work."—Boston Courier.

MACMILLAN & CO.,

66 Fifth Avenue, NEW YORK.

18mo, Cloth, 75 Cents.

"... It was the author's wish, in dwelling thus upon the rural loveliness, and the literary and historical associations of that delightful realm, to afford sympathetic guidance and useful suggestion to other American travellers who, like himself, might be attracted to roam among the shrines of the mother-land. Temperament is the explanation of style; and he has written thus of England because she has filled his mind with beauty and his heart with mingled joy and sadness; and surely some memory of her venerable ruins, her ancient shrines, her rustic glens, her gleaming rivers, and her flower-spangled meadows will mingle with the last thoughts that glimmer through his brain when the shadows of the eternal night are falling and the ramble of life is done."—From the Preface.

"He offers something more than guidance to the American traveller. He is a convincing and eloquent interpreter of the august memories and venerable sanctities of the old country."—Saturday Review.

"The book is delightful reading."—Scribner's Monthly.

"Enthusiastic and yet keenly critical notes and comments on English life and scenery."—Scotsman.

MACMILLAN & CO.,

66 Fifth Avenue, NEW YORK.

18mo, Cloth, 75 Cents.

Back to Index Next