simply powerful characters, the ideal of
which his voice and magnetism cannot in themselves sustain. At certain
lofty passages he relies upon nervous, electrical effort, the natural
weight of his temperament being unequal to the desired end. Those
flashing impulses, so compatible with the years of Richelieu and the
galled purpose of Shylock, would fail to reveal satisfactorily the
massive types, which rise by a head, like Agamemnon, above the noblest
host. Dramatic representations may be classed under the analogous
divisions of poetry: for instance, the satirical, the bucolic, the
romantic, the reflective, the epic. The latter has to do with those
towering creatures of action--Othello, Coriolanus, Virginius,
Macbeth--somewhat deficient, whether good or evil, in the casuistry of
more subtile dispositions, but giants in emotion, and kingly in repose.
They are essentially _masculine_, and we connect their ideals with the
stately figure, the deep chest-utterance, the slow, enduring majesty of
mien. The genius of Mr. Booth has that feminine quality which, though
allowing him a wider range, and enabling him to render even these
excepted parts after a tuneful, elaborate, and never ignoble method of
his own, might debar him from giving them their highest
interpretation,--or, at least, from sustaining it, without sharp
falsetto effort, throughout the entire passage of a play. In a few
impersonations, where Kemble, with all his mannerisms and defective
elocution, and Macready, notwithstanding his uninspired, didactic
nature, were most at their ease and successful, this actor would be
somewhat put to his mettle,--a fact of which he is probably himself no
less aware.

After all, what are we saying, except that his genius is rather
Corinthian than Doric, and therefore more cultured, mobile, and of wider
range? If Kemble was the ideal Coriolanus and Henry V., he was too
kingly as Hamlet, and Booth is the _princeliest_ Hamlet that ever trod
the stage. If Kean and the elder Booth were more supernal in their
lightnings of passion and scorn,--and there are points in "Richelieu"
which leave this a debatable question,--Edwin Booth is more equal
throughout, has every resource of taste and study at his command; his
action is finished to the last, his stage-business perfect, his reading
distinct and musical as a bell. He is thus the ripened product of our
eclectic later age, and has this advantage about him, being an
American, that he is man