er looked more wofully and ineffably lovely than his
sorrow looks in the parting scene with Ophelia, and frenzy never spoke
with a wilder glee of horrid joy and fearful exultation than is heard
in his tempestuous cry of delirium, "Nay, I know not: is it the king?"

An actor who is fine only at points is not, of course, a perfect actor.
The remark of Coleridge about the acting of Edmund Kean, that it was
like "reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning," has misled many
persons as to Kean's art. Macready bears a similar testimony. But the
weight of evidence will satisfy the reader that Kean was, in fact, a
careful student and that he never neglected any detail of his art. This
is certainly true of Edwin Booth. In the level plains that lie between
the mountain-peaks of expression he walks with as sure a footstep and as
firm a tread as on the summit of the loftiest crag or the verge of the
steepest abyss. In 1877-78, in association with the present writer, he
prepared for the press an edition of fifteen of the plays in which he
acts, and these were published for the use of actors. There is not a
line in either of those plays that he has not studiously and thoroughly
considered; not a vexed point that he has not scanned; not a
questionable reading that he has not, for his own purposes in acting,
satisfactorily settled. His Shakespearean scholarship is extensive and
sound, and it is no less minute than ample. His stage business has been
arranged, as stage business ought to be, with scientific precision. If,
as king Richard the Third, he is seen to be abstractedly toying with a
ring upon one of his fingers, or unsheathing and sheathing his dagger,
those apparently capricious actions would be found to be done because
they were illustrative parts of that monarch's personality, warranted by
the text and context. Many years ago an accidental impulse led him, as
Hamlet, to hold out his sword, hilt foremost, toward the receding
spectre, as a protective cross--the symbol of that religion to which
Hamlet so frequently recurs. The expedient was found to justify itself
and he made it a custom. In the graveyard scene of this tragedy he
directs that one of the skulls thrown up by the first clown shall have a
tattered and mouldy fool's-cap adhering to it, so that it may attract
attention, and be singled out from the others, as "Yorick's skull, the
king's jester." These are little things; but it is of a thousand little
things that a dramat