he way
to the scaffold. The spectacle had seemed to us prodigious--as it was
doubtless at its time the last word of costly scenic science; though as
I look back from the high ground of an age that has mastered tone and
fusion I seem to see it as comparatively garish and violent, after the
manner of the complacently approved stained-glass church-windows of the
same period. I was to have my impression of Charles Kean renewed later
on--ten years later, in America--without a rag of scenic reinforcement;
when I was struck with the fact that no actor so little graced by nature
probably ever went so far toward repairing it by a kind of cold rage of
endeavour. Were he and his wife really not _coercively_ interesting on
that Boston night of Macbeth in particular, hadn't their art a
distinction that triumphed over battered age and sorry harshness, or was
I but too easily beguiled by the old association? I have enjoyed and
forgotten numberless rich hours of spectatorship, but somehow still find
hooked to the wall of memory the picture of this hushed couple in the
castle court, with the knocking at the gate, with Macbeth's stare of
pitiful horror at his unused daggers and with the grand manner, up to
the height of the argument, of Mrs. Kean's coldly portentous snatch of
them. What I especially owe that lady is my sense of what she had in
common, as a queer hooped and hook-nosed figure, of large circumference
and archaic attire, strange tasteless toggery, with those performers of
the past who are preserved for us on the small canvases of Hogarth and
Zoffany; she helped one back at that time of her life to a vision of
the Mrs. Cibbers and the Mrs. Pritchards--so affecting may often be such
recovered links.

I see the evening at the Olympic as really itself partaking of that
antiquity, even though Still Waters Run Deep, then in its flourishing
freshness and as to which I remember my fine old friend Fanny Kemble's
mentioning to me in the distant after-time that she had directed Tom
Taylor to Charles de Bernard's novel of Un Gendre for the subject of it,
passed at the moment for a highly modern "social study." It is perhaps
in particular through the memory of our dismal approach to the theatre,
the squalid slum of Wych Street, then incredibly brutal and barbarous as
an avenue to joy, an avenue even sometimes for the muffled coach of
Royalty, that the episode affects me as antedating some of the
conditions of the mid-Victorian age; the g