o give the
answer.

If one could, with certainty, estimate a player's actual performance
from his untried talents, and were asked what disqualifying circumstance
exists to prevent Mr. Cooper from playing Richard, Othello, Zanga or
Hotspur as well as any man--we should answer none! But when, having seen
him act, we come in the capacity of public critics to adjudge him his
rights, we feel the mortifying necessity of speaking other language.

In Othello and Zanga, the inequality of Mr. Cooper's acting is
strikingly conspicuous. Of the great distinction between the colloquial
familiarity suitable to ordinary dialogue, and the solemn, dignified,
and lofty delivery becoming the orator in a great public assembly, Mr.
Cooper seems to have entirely lost sight in the celebrated speech to the
senate, the first lines of which may serve as a lesson how the whole
should be spoken.

"Most potent, grave, and reverend signiors,
My very worthy and approved good masters."

The pompous sound of these words, as well as the awfulness of the place,
and the august character of the assembly to which they are addressed,
sufficiently indicate the manner in which they ought to be uttered.
Instead of this Mr. Cooper (no doubt with the view to avoid pomposity
and bombast) threw into them an air of familiarity like that of a person
narrating a private transaction to an intimate friend or acquaintance:
Yet no sooner does he come to the impassioned parts, where strong
emotions call forth the manly energies, than he flames up with the
character. In the third scene of the second act, he displays much force
and dignity in the following lines:

He that stirs next to carve for his own rage,
Holds his soul light; he dies upon his motion.
Silence that dreadful bell, it frights the isle
From her propriety.

And afterwards:

Now by heaven
My blood begins my safer guides to rule;
And passion, having my best judgment collied,
Assays to lead the way: If I once stir
Or do but lift this arm, the best of you
Shall sink in my rebuke, &c. &c.

And indeed through the whole of that scene he was impressive and
important: nor, with the exception of those occasional lapses which we
have to regret in almost every character he plays, even in his Macbeth,
and the liberties he occasionally takes with the text, was there any
reason to complain, while every now and then, he emitted some of those
splendid scintillations of light which distingu