en saying "Though you may fret me, you can not
play upon me"; but he used to do so then, and the rest of the
performance was kindred with that part of it. He needed, in that period
of his development, the more terrible passions to express. Pathos and
spirituality and the mountain air of great thought were yet to be. His
Hamlet was only dazzling--the glorious possibility of what it has since
become. But his Sir Giles was a consummate work of genius--as good then
as it ever afterward became, and better than any other that has been
seen since, not excepting that of E.L. Davenport. And in all kindred
characters he showed himself a man of genius. His success was great. The
admiration that he inspired partook of zeal that almost amounted to
craziness. When he walked in the streets of Boston in 1857 his shining
face, his compact figure, and his elastic step drew every eye, and
people would pause and turn in groups to look at him.

The actor is born but the artist must be made, and the actor who is not
an artist only half fulfils his powers. Edwin Booth had not been long
upon the stage before he showed himself to be an actor. During his first
season he played Cassio in _Othello_, Wilford in _The Iron Chest_, and
Titus in _The Fall of Tarquin_, and he played them all auspiciously
well. But his father, not less wise than kind, knew that the youth must
be left to himself to acquire experience, if he was ever to become an
artist, and so left him in California, "to rough it," and there, and in
the Sandwich Islands and Australia, he had four years of the most severe
training that hardship, discipline, labour, sorrow, and stern reality
can furnish. When he came east again, in the autumn of 1856, he was no
longer a novice but an educated, artistic tragedian, still crude in some
things, though on the right road, and in the fresh, exultant vigour, if
not yet the full maturity, of extraordinary powers. He appeared first at
Baltimore, and after that made a tour of the south, and during the
ensuing four years he was seen in many cities all over the country. In
the summer of 1860 he went to England, and acted in London, Liverpool,
and Manchester, but he was back again in New York in 1862, and from
September 21, 1863 to March 23, 1867 he managed what was known as the
Winter Garden theatre, and incidentally devoted himself to the
accomplishment of some of the stateliest revivals of standard plays that
have ever been made in America. On February