led upon the name of the poor
murdered Virginia; and then the last low wail of the dying father,
conscious and happy in the great boon of death--those, as McCullough
gave them, were points of impressive beauty, invested with the
ever-varying light and shadow of a delicate artistic treatment, and all
the while animated with passionate sincerity. The perfect finish of the
performance, indeed, was little less than marvellous, when viewed with
reference to the ever-increasing volume of power and the evident reality
of afflicting emotion with which the part was carried. If acting ever
could do good the acting of McCullough did. If ever dramatic art
concerns the public welfare it is when such an ideal of manliness and
heroism is presented in such an image of nobility.

In Lear and in Othello,--as in Virginius,--the predominant quality of
McCullough's acting was a profound and beautiful sincerity. His
splendidly self-poised nature--a solid rock of truth, which enabled him,
through years of patient toil, to hold a steadfast course over all the
obstacles that oppose and amid all the chatter that assails a man who is
trying to accomplish anything grand and noble in art--bore him bravely
up in those great characters, and made him, in each of them, a stately
type of the nobility of the human soul. As the Moor, his performance was
well-nigh perfect. There was something a little fantastic, indeed, in
the facial style that he used; and that blemish was enhanced by the
display of a wild beast's head on the back of one of Othello's robes.
The tendency of that sort of ornamentation--however consonant it may be
deemed with the barbaric element in the Moor--is to suggest him as
heedful of appearances, and thus to distract regard from his experience
to his accessories. But the spirit was true. Simplicity, urged almost to
the extreme of barrenness, would not be out of place in Othello, and
McCullough, in his treatment of the part, testified to his practical
appreciation of that truth. His ideal of Othello combined manly
tenderness, spontaneous magnanimity, and trusting devotion, yet withal a
volcanic ground-swell of passion, that early and clearly displayed
itself as capable of delirium and ungovernable tempest. His method had
the calm movement of a summer cloud, in every act and word by which this
was shown. For intensity and for immediate, adequate, large, and
overwhelming response of action to emotion, that performance has not
been surpas