opted Richelieu in 1856;
and such was his success with the latter character that for many years
afterward he made it a rule (acting on the sagacious advice of the
veteran New Orleans manager, James H. Caldwell), always to introduce
himself in that part before any new community. The popular sentiment
toward him early took a romantic turn and the growth of that sentiment
has been accelerated and strengthened by every important occurrence of
his private life. In July 1860 he was married to a lovely and
interesting woman, Miss Mary Devlin, of Troy, and in February 1863 she
died. In 1867 he lost the Winter Garden theatre, which was burnt down on
the night of March 22, that year, after a performance of John Howard
Payne's _Brutus_. He had accomplished beautiful revivals of _Hamlet_,
_Othello_, _The Merchant of Venice_, and other plays at the Winter
Garden, and had obtained for that theatre an honourable eminence; but
when in 1869 he built and opened Booth's Theatre in New York, he
proceeded to eclipse all his previous efforts and triumphs. The
productions of _Romeo and Juliet_, _Othello_, _Richelieu_, _Hamlet_, _A
Winter's Tale_, and _Julius Caesar_ were marked by ample scholarship and
magnificence. When the enterprise failed and the theatre passed out of
Edwin Booth's hands (1874) the play-going public endured a calamity. But
the failure of the actor's noble endeavour to establish a great theatre
in the first city of America, like every other conspicuous event in his
career, served but to deepen the public interest in his welfare. He has
more than retrieved his losses since then, and has made more than one
triumphal march throughout the length and breadth of the Republic,
besides acting in London and other cities of Great Britain, and gaining
extraordinary success upon the stage of Germany. To think of Edwin Booth
is immediately to be reminded of those leading events in his career,
while to review them, even in a cursory glance, is to perceive that,
notwithstanding calamities and sorrows, notwithstanding a bitter
experience of personal bereavement and of the persecution of envy and
malice, Edwin Booth has ever been a favourite of fortune.

The bust of Booth as Brutus and that of John Gilbert as Sir Peter,
standing side by side in the Players' Club, stir many memories and
prompt many reflections. Gilbert was a young man of twenty-three, and
had been six years on the stage, before Edwin Booth was born; and when,
at the age of