person of his acquaintance in the boxes, and was trying to suppress a rising smile at the metamorphosis he had undergone since dinner. Again, he changes his voice three several times, in repeating the name of Hubert; and the changes might be fine, but they did not vibrate on our feelings; so we cannot tell. They appeared to us like a tragic voluntary. Through almost the whole scene this celebrated actor did not seem to feel the part itself as it was set down for him, but to be considering how he ought to feel it, or how he should express by rule and method what he did not feel. He was sometimes slow, and sometimes hurried: sometimes familiar, and sometimes solemn but always with an evident design and determination to be so. The varying tide of passion did not appear to burst from the source of nature in his breast, but to be drawn from a theatrical leaden cistern, and then directed through certain conduitpipes and artificial channels, to fill the audience with well-regulated and harmless sympathy.

We are afraid, judging from the effects of this representation, that "man delights not us, nor woman neither" for we did not like Miss O'Neill's Constance better, nor so well, as Mr. Kemble's King John. This character, more than any other of Shakspeare's females, treads perhaps upon the verge of extravagance; the impatience of grief, combined with the

violence of her temper, borders on insanity: her imagination grows light-headed. But still the boundary between poetry and frenzy is not passed: she is neither a virago nor mad. Miss O'Neill gave more of the vulgar than the poetical side of the character. She generally does so of late.

MR. KEMBLE'S RETIREMENT.*

MR. KEMBLE took his leave of the stage on Monday night, in the character of Coriolanus. On his first coming forward to pronounce his Farewell Address, he was received with a shout like thunder: on his retiring after it, the applause was long before it subsided entirely away. There is something in these partings with old public favourites exceedingly affecting. They teach us the shortness of human life, and the vanity of human pleasures. Our associations of admiration and delight with theatrical performers are among our earliest recollections-among our last regrets. They are links that connect the beginning and the end of life together; their bright and giddy career of popularity measures the arch that spans our brief existence. It is near twenty

years ago since we first saw Mr. Kemble in the same

*Covent Garden, June 25, 1817.

character-yet how short the interval seems! The impression appears as distinct as if it were of yesterday. In fact, intellectual objects, in proportion as they are lasting, may be said to shorten life. Time has no effect upon them. The petty and the personal, that which appeals to our senses and our interests, is by degrees forgotten, and fades away into the distant obscurity of the past. The grand and the ideal, that which appeals to the imagination, can only perish with it, and remains with us, unimpaired in its lofty abstraction, from youth to age; as, wherever we go, we still see the same heavenly bodies shining over our heads! We forget numberless things that have happened to ourselves, one generation of follies after another; but not the first time of our seeing Mr. Kemble, nor shall we easily forget the last! Coriolanus, the character in which he took his leave of the stage, was one of the first in which we remember to have seen him; and it was one in which we were not sorry to part with him, for we wished to see him appear like himself to the last. Nor was he wanting to himself on this occasion: he played the part as well as he ever did-with as much freshness and vigour. There was no abatement of spirit and energy-none of grace and dignity: his look, his action, his expression of the character, were the same as they ever were: they could not be finer. It is mere

cant, to say that Mr. Kemble has quite fallen off of late-that he is not what he was: he may have fallen off in the opinion of some jealous admirers, because he is no longer in exclusive possession of the stage: but in himself he has not fallen off a jot. Why then do we approve of his retiring? Because we do not wish him to wait till it is necessary for him to retire. On the last evening, he displayed the same excellences, and gave the same prominence to the very same passages, that he used to do. We might refer to his manner of doing obeisance to his mother in the triumphal procession in the second act, and to the scene with Aufidius in the last act, as among the most striking instances. The action with which he accompanied the proud taunt to Aufidius

"Like an eagle in a dove-cote, I

Flutter'd your Volscians in Corioli;
Alone I did it—”

gave double force and beauty to the image. Again, where he waits for the coming of Aufidius in his rival's house, he stood at the foot of the statue of Mars, himself another Mars! In the reconciliation scene with his mother, which is the finest in the play, he was not equally impressive. Perhaps this was not the fault of Mr. Kemble, but of the stage itself, which can hardly do justice to such thoughts and sentiments as here occur:

U

66

-My mother bows;

As if Olympus to a mole-hill should
In supplication nod."

Mr. Kemble's voice seemed to faint and stagger, to be strained and cracked, under the weight of this majestic image but, indeed, we know of no tones. deep or full enough to bear along the swelling tide of sentiment it conveys; nor can we conceive any thing in outward form to answer to it, except when Mrs. Siddons played the part of Volumnia.

We may on this occasion be expected to say a few words on the general merits of Mr. Kemble as an actor, and on the principal characters he performed; in doing which, we shall

It has always appeared to us, that the range of characters in which Mr. Kemble more particularly shone, and was superior to every other actor, were those which consisted in the development of some one solitary sentiment or exclusive passion. From a want of rapidity, of scope, and variety, he was often deficient in expressing the bustle and complication of different interests; nor did he possess the faculty of overpowering the mind by sudden and irresistible bursts of passion: but in giving the habitual workings of a predominant feeling, as in Penruddock, or