ace; and since, though his height and shoulder-breadth
are perfect, he is somewhat spare in form, you call to mind--in
accounting for this charm of motion, not studied, "like old Hayward's,
between two looking-glasses"--the law that beauty is frame-deep; that
grace results from the conscious, harmonious adjustment of joints and
bones, and not from accidental increase and decrease of their covering.
There is more hidden art in his sitting attitudes upon the quaint
lounges of the period; whether rebuking his own remissness, or listening
to "the rugged Pyrrhus," or playing upon old Polonius,--setting his
breast, as it were, against the thorn of his own disgust.

A sense of the fitness of things makes Booth hold himself in close
restraint when not engaged upon the sharper crises of the play. This we
conceive to be the true art-spirit. There is no attempt to rouse the
house by elocutionary climaxes or quick-stopping strides. Like
Betterton, he courts rapturous silence rather than clamorous applause.
So finished is all this as a study, that the changes into the more
dramatic passages at first grate harshly upon the eye and ear. For,
after all, it is a tragedy, full of spectral terrors. Lord Hamlet feels
it in his soul. Why should this delicate life be so rudely freighted?
Booth, faithful to the action, accepts the passion and the pang. We
hardly relish his gasping utterance and utter fall, when the Ghost
rehearses his story on those solemn battlements of Elsinore. But think
what he is seeing: not the stage-vision for which we care so little, but
the spectre of his father,--a midnight visitant from the grave! It has
been asserted that no man ever _believed_ he saw a spirit and survived
the shock. And it is strongly urged, as a defence of Booth's conception
of this scene, that, in the closet interview with the Queen, after the
slaying of Polonius, and on the Ghost's reappearance, we, now wrought up
to the high poetic pitch by the dialogue and catastrophe, and by the
whole progress of the piece, ourselves catch the key, expect, and fully
sympathize with his horror and prostration, and accept the fall to earth
as the proper sequel to that dreadful blazon from the other world.
Notwithstanding this, it seems to us that Booth should tone down his
manner in the first Act. The audience has hardly left the outer life,
and cannot identify itself with the player; and an artist must
acknowledge this fact, and not too far exceed the elevati