Antony, Cassius, Claude Melnotte, and the Stranger. The range thus
indicated is extraordinary; but more extraordinary still was the
evenness of the actor's average excellence throughout the breadth of
that range.

Booth's tragedy is better than his elegant comedy. There are other
actors who equal or surpass him in Benedick or Don Caesar. The comedy in
which he excels is that of silvery speciousness and bitter sarcasm, as
in portions of Iago and Richard the Third and the simulated madness of
Lucius Brutus, and the comedy of grim drollery, as in portions of
Richelieu--his expression of those veins being wonderfully perfect. But
no other actor who has trod the American stage in our day has equalled
him in certain attributes of tragedy that are essentially poetic. He is
not at his best, indeed, in all the tragic parts that he acts; and, like
his father, he is an uneven actor in the parts to which he is best
suited. No person can be said to know Edwin Booth's acting who has not
seen him play the same part several times. His artistic treatment will
generally be found adequate, but his mood or spirit will continually
vary. He cannot at will command it, and when it is absent his
performance seems cold. This characteristic is, perhaps, inseparable
from the poetic temperament. Each ideal that he presents is poetic; and
the suitable and adequate presentation of it, therefore, needs poetic
warmth and glamour. Booth never goes behind his poet's text to find a
prose image in the pages of historic fact. The spectator who takes the
trouble to look into his art will find it, indeed, invariably accurate
as to historic basis, and will find that all essential points and
questions of scholarship have been considered by the actor. But this is
not the secret of its power upon the soul. That power resides in its
charm, and that charm consists in its poetry. Standing on the lonely
ramparts of Elsinore, and with awe-stricken, preoccupied, involuntary
glances questioning the star-lit midnight air, while he talks with his
attendant friends, Edwin Booth's Hamlet is the simple, absolute
realisation of Shakespeare's haunted prince, and raises no question, and
leaves no room for inquiry, whether the Danes in the Middle Ages wore
velvet robes or had long flaxen hair. It is dark, mysterious,
melancholy, beautiful--a vision of dignity and of grace, made sublime by
suffering, made weird and awful by "thoughts beyond the reaches of our
souls." Sorrow nev