e, than Edwin Booth. Only
one man of our time has equalled Edwin Booth in this singular splendour
of countenance--the great New England orator Rufus Choate. Had Choate
been an actor upon the stage--as he was before a jury--with those
terrible eyes of his, and that passionate Arab face, he must have
towered fully to the height of the tradition of George Frederick Cooke.

The lurid flashes of passion and the vehement outbursts in the acting of
Edwin Booth are no doubt the points that most persons who have seen him
will most clearly remember. Through these a spectator naturally discerns
the essential nature of an actor. The image of George Frederick Cooke,
pointing with his long, lean forefinger and uttering Sir Giles's
imprecation upon Marrall, never fades out of theatrical history.
Garrick's awful frenzy in the storm scene of King Lear, Kean's colossal
agony in the farewell speech of Othello, Macready's heartrending yell in
_Werner_, Junius Booth's terrific utterance of Richard's "What do they
i' the north?" Forrest's hyena snarl when, as Jack Cade, he met Lord Say
in the thicket, or his volumed cry of tempestuous fury when, as Lucius
Brutus, he turned upon Tarquin under the black midnight sky--those are
things never to be forgotten. Edwin Booth has provided many such great
moments in acting, and the traditions of the stage will not let them
die. To these no doubt we must look for illuminative manifestations of
hereditary genius. Garrick, Henderson, Cooke, Edmund Kean, Junius Booth,
and Edwin Booth are names that make a natural sequence in one
intellectual family. Could we but see them together, we should
undoubtedly find them, in many particulars, kindred. Henderson
flourished in the school of nature that Garrick had created--to the
discomfiture of Quin and all the classics. Cooke had seen Henderson
act, and was thought to resemble him. Edmund Kean worshipped the memory
of Cooke and repeated many of the elder tragedian's ways. So far,
indeed, did he carry his homage that when he was in New York in 1824 he
caused Cooke's remains to be taken from the vault beneath St. Paul's
church and buried in the church-yard, where a monument, set up by Kean
and restored by his son Charles, by Sothern, and by Edwin Booth, still
marks their place of sepulture. That was the occasion when, as Dr.
Francis records, in his book on old New York, Kean took the index finger
of Cooke's right hand, and he, the doctor, took his skull, as relics. "I