, upon the Norwich boards, in the season of that year, being then
in the twenty-second year of his age. Having a natural bent to tragedy,
he chose the part of Pyrrhus in the 'Distressed Mother,' to Sally
Parker's Hermione. We find him afterwards as Barnwell, Altamont,
Chamont, etc.; but, as if Nature had destined him to the sock, an
unavoidable infirmity absolutely discapacitated him for tragedy. His
person, at this latter period of which I have been speaking, was
graceful, and even commanding; his countenance set to gravity; he had
the power of arresting the attention of an audience at first sight
almost beyond any other tragic actor. But he could not hold it. To
understand this obstacle, we must go back a few years to those appalling
reveries at Charnwood. Those illusions, which had vanished before the
dissipation of a less recluse life and more free society, now in his
solitary tragic studies, and amid the intense calls upon feeling
incident to tragic acting, came back upon him with tenfold vividness. In
the midst of some most pathetic passage, the parting of Jaffier with his
dying friend, for instance, he would suddenly be surprised with a fit of
violent horse-laughter. While the spectators were all sobbing before
him with emotion, suddenly one of those grotesque faces would peep out
upon him, and he could not resist the impulse. A timely excuse once or
twice served his purpose; but no audiences could be expected to bear
repeatedly this violation of the continuity of feeling. He describes
them (the illusions) as so many demons haunting him, and paralyzing
every effect. Even now, I am told, he cannot recite the famous soliloquy
in 'Hamlet,' even in private, without immoderate bursts of laughter.
However, what he had not force of reason sufficient to overcome he had
good sense enough to turn into emolument, and determined to make a
commodity of his distemper. He prudently exchanged the buskin for the
sock, and the illusions instantly ceased; or, if they occurred for a
short season, by their very cooperation added a zest to his comic
vein,--some of his most catching faces being (as he expresses it) little
more than transcripts and copies of those extraordinary phantasmata.

"We have now drawn out our hero's existence to the period when he was
about to meet for the first time the sympathies of a London audience.
The particulars of his success since have been too much before our eyes
to render a circumstantial detail of t