lonely tower, left behind,
With silver cross and ball.

And distant, round and dim,
Behind the waste, behind the gibbets high,
The witches' moon, with filmy bloodshot eye,
Peering above the rim!

W. W. YOUNG.

FREDERIC LEMAITRE.

"Incomparably the finest acting I ever saw," wrote Dickens from Paris
twenty years ago, "I saw last night at the Ambigu." The actor was
Frederic Lemaitre, and the part he played was that of Georges de Germany
in the drama of _Thirty Years, or the Life of a Gambler_. At this time
(February, 1855) Lemaitre was already so old a man that Dickens was
surprised to see him still playing, and the part was one which the actor
had created originally twenty-eight years before that. He first played
it at the Porte Saint-Martin Theatre in 1827, close upon half a century
ago. "Never," continues Dickens, "did I see anything in art so exaltedly
horrible and awful. In the earlier acts he was so well made up and so
light and active that he really looked sufficiently young. But in the
last two, when he had grown old and miserable, he did the finest things,
I really believe, that are within the power of acting. Two or three
times a great cry of horror went all round the house. When he met in the
inn-yard the traveler whom he murders, and first saw his money, the
manner in which the crime came into his head--and eyes--was as truthful
as it was terrific. This traveler, being a good fellow, gives him wine.
You should see the dim remembrance of his better days that comes over
him as he takes the glass, and in a strange dazed way makes as if he
were going to touch the other man's, or do some airy thing with it, and
then stops and flings the contents down his hot throat, as if he were
pouring it into a limekiln. But this was nothing to what follows after
he has done the murder, and comes home with a basket of provisions, a
ragged pocket full of money, and a badly-washed, bloody right hand,
which his little girl finds out. After the child asked him if he had
hurt his hand, his going aside, turning himself round, and looking over
all his clothes for spots was so inexpressibly dreadful that it really
scared one. He called for wine, and the sickness that came upon him when
he saw the color was one of the things which brought out the curious cry
I have spoken of from the audience. Then he fell into a sort of bloody
mist, and went on to the end groping about, with no mind for anythi