Hamlet to his early days, and over all his griefs, until he felt himself, like Hamlet, isolated amidst the revelry of the Danish

court.

The beauty of Kemble's performance of Hamlet was its retrospective air, its intensity and abstraction, His youth seemed delivered over to sorrow; and memory was indeed with him "the warder of the brain." Other actors have played the part with more energy; have walked more "i' the sun;" have aimed more at effect; but Kemble's sensible, lonely Hamlet, has never been surpassed.

Mr, Kemble's delineation of Cato was magnificent. The hopes of Rome seemed fixed upon him. The fate of "the immortal city" appeared to have retired to his tower-like figure as to a fortress, and thence to look down upon the petty struggles of traitors and assasins. He stood in the gorgeous foldings of his robes, proudly pre-eminent. When his son was killed, and the stoicism of the Roman wrestled with the feelings of the father, the contest was terrifically displayed.

There were those who preferred him in Brutus. The Roman part of the character was certainly admirably pourtrayed; but the tenderness of heart, which occasionally rises up through all the Roman sternness, was perhaps not sufficiently marked. And yet, nothing could exceed the manner in which he spoke the three simple words,

"Portia is dead."

Uttered by a common actor, those words convey only the relation of a fact, melancholy, indeed, and therefore affecting; but when delivered by Mr. Kemble, they strikingly exhibited the workings of a mind in which anguish was with difficulty subdued by philosophy. The effect was always electrical.

Coriolanus was a Roman of quite another stamp; and Mr. Kemble seems to have been more universally liked in that part than in any other. The contempt of inferiors suited the haughty tone of his voice; and the fierce impetuosity of the brave young patrician was admirably seconded by the muscular beauty of person in the actor. When he entered

in the first scene, the crowd of mob-Romans fell back as though they espied a wild bull; and he dashed in amongst them in scarlet pride; and looked, even in the eyes of the audience, sufficient "to beat forty of them." His asking to be Consul, his quarrel with the tribunes, his appearance under the statue of Mars, in the hall of Aufidius, and his taunt of the Volscian just before his death, were specimens of noble and earnest acting, that can never be forgotten by those who have witnessed them.

In Macbeth this great performer was grandly effective, particularly in the murder scene. At the banquet, he was kingly indeed! The thought of the witches seemed to be always upon him, weighing him down with supernatural fear. In the latter scenes he displayed great energy and spirit; and there was a fine melancholy tone which smote upon the heart in his delivery of the lines:

My way of life

Is fallen into the sear, the yellow leaf;
And that which should accompany

old age,

As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,

I must not look to have; but, in their stead,

Curses, not loud, but deep, mouth-honour, breath,

Which the poor heart would fain deny, but dare not.”

His Richard the Third, although in many instances admirable, was perhaps too collected, too weighty in the consideration of crime, too slow of apprehension. It wanted that tempest and whirlwind of the soul, that life, and spirit, and dazzling rapidity of motion, which seem essential to the valiant, energetic, and ambitious tyrant.

In King John, (a character however somewhat tedious,) Mr. Kemble was greatly elaborate and impressive. His scene with Hubert was as powerful as genius could make it, His death chilled the heart, as the touch of marble chills the ' hand; and it almost seemed as if a monument was wrestling with fate.

His Lear was one of his finest performances. Who that has heard it can ever forget the appalling manner in which he uttered the dreadful curse on his unnatural daughter?

Hear, nature, hear!

Dear goddess, hear! Suspend thy purpose, if
Thou didst intend to make this creature fruitful!
Into her womb convey sterility!

And from her derogate body never spring

A babe to honour her! If she must teem,
Create her child of spleen; that it may live,
And be a thwart disnatur'd torment to her!
Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth;
With cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks;
Turn all her mother's pains and benefits

To laughter and contempt; that she may feel
How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is

To have a thankless child!"

That Mr. Kemble was capable of showing the force of contrast to a wonderful extent, was, among other instances, evident in his Posthumus Leonatus, in the vivid change from the agony of suspicion to the relief of hope, when, in the midst of his torture at Iachimo's proof of Imogen's alleged infidelity, eagerly catching at the bare suggestion of his friend Philario, that the ring might have been stolen by her women, and half interrupting him, he exclaimed,

"Aye, very true!"

In characters of vehemence and passion, such as Hotspur and Octavian, he so contrived to husband his physical powers, even in their decline, as to produce astounding effects in the most prominent scenes.

One of the happiest and most spirited of all Mr. Kemble's performances, and in which even his defects blended with his excellencies to form a perfect whole, was his Pierre. The dissolute indifference assumed by this character to cover the darkness of his designs, and the fierceness of his revenge, accorded admirably with Mr. Kemble's manner; and the tone of morbid rancorous raillery in which Pierre delights to indulge, was in unison with the actor's reluctant, contemptuous personifications of gaiety, and with the scornful spirit of his comic muse, which always laboured invita Minerva against the grain.

Penruddock, in the Wheel of Fortune, was also one of

those characters in which no other actor could pretend to approach him. The mild, pensive, deeply-rooted melancholy of Penruddock, his embittered recollections and dignified benevolence, were exhibited by Mr. Kemble with equal truth, elegance, and feeling. Although he dressed the part in the humblest modern habit, still he looked some superior creature. In the Stranger, too, which is in fact nearly the same character, he appeared to brood over the remembrance of disappointed hope till his grief became a part of himself. The feeling which pervaded him never varied. The weight at his heart was never lightened. It seemed as if his whole life was a suppressed sigh.

Having thus, however imperfectly, described the qualifications of Mr. Kemble for his profession, and noticed a few of his principal characters, we shall proceed to give some account of his retirement; which was attended by such extraordinary tokens of public admiration and regard, that it deserves to be particularly recorded.

On the 25th of October, 1816, Mr. Kemble, having returned to London, commenced his last theatrical season, and played most of his chief characters (several of them repeatedly), viz. Cato, Coriolanus, the Stranger, Pierre, Brutus, Lord Townley, King John, Penruddock, Hotspur, Hamlet, Zanga, Cardinal Wolsey, Octavian, Leonatus Posthumus, and Macbeth. On the 23d of June, 1817, he took his final leave of the stage in Coriolanus,

As soon as it became generally known that Mr. Kemble was to perform for the last time on the night of the 23d of June, every box in the house was secured, and the orchestra was fitted up for the accommodation of those lovers of the drama who longed to see their great actor once more. All the leading members of the profession, and among them M. Talma, were present. Mr. Kemble played Coriolanus with an abandonment of self-care, with a boundless energy, a loose of strength, as though he felt that he should never play again, and that he needed to husband his powers no longer. The audience were borne along with him until they ap

proached the rapids of the last act and then they seemed at once conscious of their approaching fate, and shrank from the fall. The curtain dropped amidst shouts of " No farewell! No farewell!" but, true to himself, the proud actor came forward, evidently "oppressed with grief, oppressed with care," He struggled long before he could obtain silence, — and then he struggled long before he could break it. At length, he stammered out, in honest, earnest truth, “I have now appeared before you for the last time; this night closes my professional life." The burst of "No! No!" was tremendous; but Mr. Kemble had "rallied life's whole energy to die;" and he stood his ground; continuing his farewell address, when the storm abated, in the following words; of course frequently interrupted by his own feelings, and by the ardent and affectionate cheers of the audience.

"I am so much agitated that I cannot express with any tolerable propriety what I wish to say. I feared, indeed, that I should not be able to take my leave of you with sufficient fortitude, composure, I mean, and had intended to withdraw myself from before you in silence; but I suffered myself to be persuaded that if it were only from old custom, some little parting word would be expected from me on this occasion. Ladies and Gentlemen, I entreat you to believe, that, whatever abilities I have possessed, — either as an actor, in the performance of the characters allotted to me, or as a manager, in endeavouring at a union of propriety and splendour in the representation of our best plays, and particularly of those of the divine Shakspeare ; — I entreat you to believe that all my labours, all my studies, whatever they have been, have been made delightful to me, by the approbation with which you have been pleased constantly to reward them.

"I beg you, Ladies and Gentlemen, to accept my thanks for the great kindness you have invariably shown me, from the first night I became a candidate for public favour, down to this painful moment of my parting with you! I must take