in the
dark street, with sword in hand, above the prostrate bodies of Cassio
and Roderigo, and as the sudden impulse to murder them strikes his
brain, breathing out in a blood-curdling whisper, "How silent is this
town!" his Bertuccio, begging at the door of the banquet-hall, and
breaking down in hysterics of affected glee and maddening agony; his
Lear, at that supreme moment of intolerable torture when he parts away
from Goneril and Regan, with his wild scream of revenges that shall be
the terrors of the earth; his Richard the Third, with the gigantic
effrontery of his "Call him again," and with his whole matchless and
wonderful utterance of the awful remorse speech with which the king
awakens from his last earthly sleep--those, among many others, rank with
the best dramatic images that ever were chronicled, and may well be
cited to illustrate Booth's invincible and splendid adequacy at the
great moments of his art.

Edwin Booth has been tried by some of the most terrible afflictions that
ever tested the fortitude of a human soul. Over his youth, plainly
visible, impended the lowering cloud of insanity. While he was yet a
boy, and when literally struggling for life in the semi-barbarous wilds
of old California, he lost his beloved father, under circumstances of
singular misery. In early manhood he laid in her grave the woman of his
first love--the wife who had died in absence from him, herself scarcely
past the threshold of youth, lovely as an angel and to all that knew her
precious beyond expression. A little later his heart was well-nigh
broken and his life was well-nigh blasted by the crime of a lunatic
brother that for a moment seemed to darken the hope of the world.
Recovering from that blow, he threw all his resources and powers into
the establishment of the grandest theatre in the metropolis of America,
and he saw his fortune of more than a million dollars, together with the
toil of some of the best years of his life, frittered away. Under all
trials he has borne bravely up, and kept the even, steadfast tenor of
his course; strong, patient, gentle, neither elated by public homage nor
imbittered by private grief. Such a use of high powers in the dramatic
art, and the development and maintenance of such a character behind
them, entitle him to the affection of his countrymen, proud equally of
his goodness and his renown.

V.

MARY ANDERSON: HERMIONE: PERDITA.

On November 25, 1875 an audience was assem