ou very much for Lamb's "Dramatic Specimens;" I read the
scene you had copied from "Philaster" directly; how fine it is! how
I should like to act it! Mr. Harness has sent me the first volume
of the family edition of the "Old Plays." I think sweeping those
fine dramas clean is a good work that cannot be enough commended.
What treasures we possess and make no use of, while we go on acting
"Gamesters" and "Grecian Daughters," and such poor stuff! But I
have no time for ecstasies or exclamations. Yours ever most truly,

F.A. KEMBLE.

I have said that hardly any new part was ever assigned to me that I did
not receive with a rueful sense of inability to what I called "do
anything with it." Julia in "The Hunchback," and Camiola in "The Maid of
Honor," were among the few exceptions to this preparatory attack of
despondency; but those I in some sort choose myself, and all my other
characters were appointed me by the management, in obedience to whose
dictates, and with the hope of serving the interests of the theater, I
suppose I should have acted Harlequin if I had been ordered to do so.

Lady Teazle and Mrs. Oakley were certainly no exceptions to this
experience of a cold fit of absolute incapacity with which I received
every new part appointed me, and my studying of them might have been
called lugubrious, whatever my subsequent performance of them may have
been. My mother was of invaluable assistance to me in the process, and I
owe to her whatever effect I produced in either part. She had great
comic as well as pathetic power, and the incisive point of her delivery
gave every shade of meaning of the dialogue with admirable truth and
pungency; her own performance of Mrs. Oakley had been excellent; I acted
it, even with the advantage of her teaching, very tamely. Jealousy, in
any shape, was not a passion that I sympathized with; the tragic misery
of Bianca's passion was, however, a thing I could imagine sufficiently
well to represent it; but not so Mrs. Oakley's fantastical frenzies. But
the truth is that it was not until many years later and in my readings
of Shakespeare that I developed any real comic faculty at all; and I
have been amused in the later part of my public career to find comedy
often considered my especial gift, rather than the tragic and pathetic
one I was supposed at the beginning of it to possess.

The fact is that e