holds in his profession renders
it important that just opinions should be formed upon the subject of his
performances, and that his merits should be as closely as possible
canvassed, and as precisely ascertained, it would be inconsistent with
the duty of a public critic wholly to decline the task, however
difficult and laborious he may find it.

We have now before us a criticism upon Mr. Cooper which once appeared in
a periodical publication at Charleston S. C. and in which I find the
following passage.

"Nature husbands her gifts so carefully that where equality appears in
all the parts of any object, supreme excellence is rarely seen; where
great beauties are found, they are generally mixed with some
considerable alloy. Of all the actors we have ever seen, Mr. Mossop was
the one whom Mr. Cooper, in this respect, most resembles. With him, when
it was not a blaze, it was a cloud. No man, not Garrick himself ever
equalled his beauties; but his defects were great. The beauties,
however, were so far superior in numbers to the defects, and in quality,
to the excellencies of all other men, that he obtained from the greatest
critic of that day, the tide of the _Tragedy Sheet Anchor_." All this is
strictly true; but there is this difference between that great actor and
Mr. Cooper, Mossop never committed a fault from negligence; studiously,
I might almost say superstitiously, devoted to the cultivation of his
professional talents, he left nothing undone which industry could
accomplish, and whenever he went wrong, failed from an almost pedantic
desire to do too much--from a stiffness and stateliness of deportment,
and an embarrassment of which he had begun to get rid but a few years
before his death. Mr. Cooper labours under no obstruction of this kind.

The natural talents displayed by Mr. Cooper in most of his performances
forbid it to be believed that his failures result from incompetency; or
that there is any excellence, to which the actors of the present day
attain, too great for his grasp, if his industry were nearly equal to
his personal endowments. But the honest and zealous critic loses all
patience, when he sees _first talents_ supinely contenting themselves
with less than _first honours_. What are the natural or acquired
endowments of Kemble or Cooke, whether mental or corporeal? Certainly
not superior to those of Mr. Cooper. How do they respectively stand in
the records of professional fame? It would be invidious t