in his career, and
chronicled significant and amusing anecdotes of his peculiarities. He
was on the stage from 1813 to 1852, in which latter year he died, aged
fifty-six. In his youth he served for a while in the British navy,
showed some talent for painting, learned the printer's trade, wrote a
little, and dabbled in sculpture--all before he turned actor. The
powerful hostility of Edmund Kean and his adherents drove him from the
London stage, though not till after he had gained honours there, and he
came to America in 1821, and bought a farm near Baltimore, where he
settled, and where his son Edwin (the seventh of ten children) was born.
That farm remained in the family till 1880, when for the first time it
changed hands. There is a certain old cherry-tree growing upon
it--remarkable among cherry-trees for being large, tall, straight,
clean, and handsome--amid the boughs of which the youthful Edwin might
often have been found in his juvenile days. It is a coincidence that
Edwin L. Davenport and John McCullough, also honoured names in American
stage history, were born on the same day in the same month with Edwin
Booth, though in different years.

From an early age Edwin Booth was associated with his father in all the
wanderings and strange and often sad adventures of that wayward man of
genius, and no doubt the many sorrowful experiences of his youth
deepened the gloom of his inherited temperament. Those who know him well
are aware that he has great tenderness of heart and abundant playful
humour; that his mind is one of extraordinary liveliness, and that he
sympathises keenly and cordially with the joys and sorrows of others;
and yet that he seems saturated with sadness, isolated from
companionship, lonely and alone. It is this temperament, combined with a
sombre and melancholy aspect of countenance, that has helped to make him
so admirable in the character of Hamlet. Of his fitness for that part
his father was the first to speak, when on a night many years ago, in
Sacramento, they had dressed for Pierre and Jaffier, in _Venice
Preserved_. Edwin, as Jaffier, had put on a close-fitting robe of black
velvet. "You look like Hamlet," the father said. The time was destined
to come when Edwin Booth would be accepted all over America as the
greatest Hamlet of the day. In the season of 1864-65, at the Winter
Garden theatre, New York, he acted that part for a hundred nights in
succession, accomplishing a feat then unprecedente