stage will admit, to perfection. In the hypocritical selfpossession, in the caution, and afterwards the pride, cruelty, and avarice, Luke appears to us a man incapable of imagining to the extreme heinousness of crimes. To him they are mere magic-lantern horrors. He is at no trouble to deaden his conscience. Mr. Kean's two characters of this week, comprising as they do, the utmost of quiet and turbulence, invite us to say a few words on his acting in general. We have done this before, but we do it again without remorse. Amid his numerous excellencies, the one which at this moment most weighs upon us, is the elegance, gracefulness, and music of elocution. A melodious passage in poetry is full of pleasures both sensual and spiritual. The spiritual is felt when the very letters and points of charactered language show like the hieroglyphics of beauty; the mysterious signs of our immortal freemasonry! "A thing to dream of, not to tell!" The sensual life of verse springs warm from the lips of Kean, and to one learned in Shakespearian hieroglyphics-learned in the spiritual portion of those lines to which Kean adds a sensual grandeur; his tongue must seem to have robbed the Hybla bees and left them honeyless! There is an indescribable gusto in his voice, by which we feel that the utterer is thinking of the past and future while speaking of the instant. When he says in Othello" Put up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them," we feel that his throat had commanded where swords were as thick as reeds. From eternal risk, he speaks as though his body were unassailable. Again, his exclamation of "blood, blood, blood!" is direful and slaughterous to the deepest degree; the very words appear stained and gory. His nature hangs over them, making a prophetic repast. The voice is loosed on them, like the wild dog on the savage relics of an eastern conflict; and we can distinctly hear it "gorging and growling o'er carcase and limb." In Richard, "Be stirring with the lark to-morrow, gentle Norfolk!"1 comes from him, as through the morning atmosphere, towards which he yearns. We could cite a volume of such immortal scraps, and dote upon them with our remarksbut as an end must come, we will content ourselves with a single syllable. It is in those lines of impatience to the night who, "like a foul and ugly witch, doth limp so tediously away." Surely this intense power of anatomizing the passions of every syllable, of taking to himself the airings of verse, is the means by which he becomes a storm with such fiery decision; and by which, with a still deeper charm, he does his spiriting gently. Other actors are continually thinking of their sum-total effect throughout a play. Kean delivers himself up to the instant feeling, without a shadow of a thought about anything else. He feels his being as deeply as Words-▸ worth, or any other of our intellectual monopolists. From all his comrades he stands alone, reminding us of him, whom Dante has so finely described in his Hell: "And sole apart retir'd, the Soldan fierce." " Although so many times he has lost the battle of Bosworth Field, we can easily conceive him really expectant of victory, and a different termination of the piece. Yet we are as moths about a candle in speaking of this great man. "Great, let us call him, for he conquered us!" We will say no more. 1 Kean! Kean! have a carefulness Stir with the lark to-morrow, gentle Norfolk. 2 KING RICHARD III, Act v, Scene 3. Cary's Dante, Inferno, Canto iv, line 126. of thy health, a nursing regard for thy own genius, a pity for us in these cold and enfeebling times! Cheer us a little in the failure of our days! for romance lives but in books. The goblin is driven from the hearth, and the rainbow is robbed of its mystery.' II. ON KEAN IN "RICHARD DUKE OF YORK." THE Committee of Drury Lane have thought proper to give the name of Richard to the last born of that ancient house, without considering that they have a child still living who bears the same title. A confusion has very naturally arisen in the minds of those who have been introduced to both as to which is which, and we will venture to say that more than half the spectators believe, in the innocence of their hearts, that there are not two Duke Richards, but one Duke Richard. "'Tis yet to know" with many that this same Duke of York is the father of their old, savage, crafty, and courageous favourite, Richard the Third. The present ingenious compilation, or rather the essence of three of Shakespeare's historical dramas, only throws us back into the breaking of the stormy day of the Lancastrian strife. We have on the stage been used to the noontide of the struggle, and to its tempestuous night. It is the morning of the Plantagenets: the white rose is but just budding on the tree, and we have known it only when it was wide dispersed See note at page 37 of Volume II. It is curious that Keats should have taken this idea into the stock of his conversation within a week after publishing it. and flaunting in the busy air, or when it was struck, and the leaves beat from the stem. Perhaps there is not a more interesting time in history than this pelican strife, for it has a locality which none of us can misstate, at the same time that it relishes of romance in its wildness and chivalrous encounters. We read of royal deeds of valour and endurance, and of the personal conflicts between armed and youthful princes, under waving and crested banners, till we might almost think the most knightly days were come again; but then we read of Tewkesbury and Gloucester, and of cities and towns which lie all about us, and we find the most romantic occurrences realized in our minds. What might almost have been deemed an airy nothing acquires at once a local habitation and a name. The meeting with such places as the Temple Hall and Crosby House flatly contradicts the half-formed notion that "Tis but our fantasies," and we readily "let belief take hold of us." We have no doubt but that Shakespeare intended to have written a complete dramatic history of England, for from Richard the Second to Richard the Third the links are unbroken. The three parts of Henry VI. fall in between the two Richards. They are written with infinite vigour, but their regularity tied the hand of Shakespeare. Particular facts kept him in the high road, and would not suffer him to turn down leafy and winding lanes, or to break wildly and at once into the breathing fields. The poetry is for the most part ironed and manacled with a chain of facts, and cannot get free; it cannot escape from the prison house of history, nor often move without our being disturbed with the clanking of its fetters. The poetry of Shakespeare is generally free as is the wind-a perfect thing of the elements, winged and sweetly coloured. Poetry must be free! It is of the air, not of the earth; 66 and the higher it soars the nearer it gets to its home. The poetry of "Romeo and Juliet," of "Hamlet," of "Macbeth," is the poetry of Shakespeare's soul-full of love and divine romance. It knows no stop in its delight, but "goeth where it listeth "—remaining, however, in all men's hearts a perpetual and golden dream. The poetry of "Lear," "Othello," "Cymbeline," &c., is the poetry of human passions and affections, made almost ethereal by the power of the poet. Again, the poetry of 'Richard," "John," and the Henries is the blending the Imaginative with the historical: it is poetry!-but often times poetry wandering on the London Road. We hate to say a word against a word of Shakespeare's, and we can only do so by comparing himself with himself. On going into the three parts of "Henry the Sixth" for themselves, we extract all dispraise and accusation, and declare them to be perfect works. Indeed, they are such. We live again in the olden time. York plucks the pale rose before our eyes. The Duke of Talbot stands before us majestic, huge, appalling—“in his habit as he lived." Henry, the weak, careless, and good Henry, totters palpably under his crown. The Temple Hall is in our sight. By way of making some reparation for having put these plays last in our estimate, and for the real pleasure of contradicting the critical remarks which we in our petty wisdom have urged, and for the simple and intense delight we take in copying and feeding upon noble passages in Shakespeare, we will here give one of the speeches of Richard Duke of York, which is in itself rich enough to buy an immortality for any man : "Oft have I seen a corse from whence the ghost |