Thursday-as Falstaff, in King Henry IV. Part

1st.

Friday-as Hamlet, and also as the Yankee, Solomon Swop.

Saturday-as Rip Van Winkle, and Horse Shoe Robinson.

Monday-as Falstaff, in The Second Part of King Henry IV.

Though I was well received in each of these characters by the notoriously cold and reserved audiences of Philadelphia, Mr. Burton did not succeed in making my performance of Hamlet and of King Lear nearly as attractive as most of my comic characters proved, and without vexation or regret I struck them both from my repertoire, and soon thereafter studied and produced Sir Pertinax MacSycophant in Macklin's MAN OF THE WORLD, and also O'Callaghan, in Bernard's farce of His Last Legs; in both which parts I have been a favorite with every public in either hemisphere.

PART III.

NOTES UPON KING LEAR.

GENIUS AND TASTE.

"Genius all sunbeams where he throws a smile,
Imprégnates Nature faster than the Nile;
Wild and impetuous, high as Heaven aspires,
All science animates, all virtue fires,
Creates ideal worlds and there convenes

Aërial forms and visionary scenes.

But Taste, corrects by one therial touch,

What seems too little and what seems too much;
Marks the fine point, where each consenting part
Slides into beauty with the ease of art;
This bids to rise, and That with grace to fall,
And rounds, unites, refines, and heightens all."

CAWTHORN.

NOTES UPON KING LEAR.

"Take pains the genuine meaning to explore;
There sweat, there strain; tug the laborious oar;
Search every comment that your care can find;
Some here, some there, may hit the poet's mind:
When things appear unnatural and hard,
Consult your author with himself compar'd."

Roscommon.

KING LEAR is not a popular play with the million; because the young, who constitute the great majority of play-goers, are too inexperienced to comprehend the dotage of the aged and tender father, and to sympathize with his consequent afflictions ;-regarding Lear, as they generally do, merely as an old despot, and his sorrows and sufferings as measurably deserved by his own folly and tyranny; nor can youth have acquired knowledge enough of mankind to detect and appreciate Shakespeare's exquisite art and profound philosophy in the drawing of Lear's madness, its origin, progress, and climax; nor his frightfully faithful portraiture towards the fatal denouement of nature's last and abortive struggle

with extreme old age and bodily infirmity to restore Lear's mental balance, and to re-establish his reason: therefore, this play is better adapted to the understanding of the sage and philosopher, and the mad scenes, especially, to the appreciation of experienced and scientific physicians, who have been accustomed professionally to witness and contemplate the subtle workings of the maniac's mind.

"The proper study of mankind is man.”—Pope.

Coleridge, in his Table Talk, says :-"Lear is the most tremendous effort of Shakespeare as a poet, Hamlet as a philosopher and meditator, and Othello is the union of the two. There is something gigantic and unformed in the former two; but in the latter (Othello), everything assumes its due place and proportion, and the whole mature powers of his mind are displayed in admirable equilibrium."

My opinion is, that the difference noticed does not arise so much from an inequality in Shakespeare's genius for drawing perfectly these three distinctive characters, but in the critic's taste for the different subjects they respectively comprehend, and their several moral spheres of action.

A critic, in the Edinburgh Review for July, 1840, (Article, “Recent Shakesperian Literature,”)

asserts:

"The whole circle of Literature, ancient and modern, possesses nothing comparable to that world