to be regularly transferred from one of these papers to the other, sometimes formally and sometimes without ceremony, till I was forced to quit the last-mentioned by want of health and leisure, would make rather an amusing story, but that I do not choose to tell "the secrets of the prison-house." I would, however, advise any one who has an ambition to write, and to write his best, in the periodical press, to get if possible a position in the Times newspaper, the Editor of which is a man of business, and not of letters. He may write there as long and as good articles as he can, without being turned out for it.

The best articles in this series appeared originally in the Morning Chronicle. They are those relating to Mr. Kean. I went to see him the first night of his appearing in Shylock. I remember it well. The boxes were empty, and the pit not half full: some quantity of barren spectators and idle renters were thinly scattered to make up a show." The whole presented a dreary, hopeless aspect. I was in considerable apprehension for the result. From

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the first scene in which Mr. Kean came on, my doubts were at an end. I had been told to give as favourable an account as I could: I gave a true one. I am not one of those who, when they see the sun breaking from behind a cloud, stop to ask others whether it is the moon. Mr. Kean's appearance was the first gleam of genius breaking athwart the gloom of the stage, and the public have since gladly basked in its ray, in spite of actors, managers, and critics. I cannot say that my opinion has much changed since that time. Why should it? I had the same eyes to see with that I have now, the same ears to hear with, and the same understanding to judge with. Why then should I not form the same judgment? My opinions have been sometimes called singular: they are merely sincere. I say what I think : I think what I feel. I cannot help receiving certain impressions from things; and I have sufficient courage to declare (somewhat abruptly) what they are. This is the only singularity I am conscious of. I do not shut my eyes to extraordinary merit because I hate it, and refuse to open them till the clamours of others

make me, and then affect to wonder extravagantly at what I have before affected hypocritically to despise. I do not make it a common practice to think nothing of an actor or an author, because all the world have not pronounced in his favour; and after they have, to persist in condemning him, as a proof not of imbecility and ill-nature, but of independence of taste and spirit. Nor do I endeavour to communicate the infection of my own dulness, cowardice, and spleen to others, by chilling the coldness of their constitutions with the poisonous slime of vanity or interest, and setting up my own conscious inability or unwillingness to form an opinion on any one subject, as the height of candour and judgment. -I did not endeavour to persuade Mr. Perry that Mr. Kean was an actor that would not last, merely because he had not lasted; nor that Miss Stephens knew nothing of singing, because she had a sweet voice. On the contrary, I did all I could to counteract the effect of these safe, not very sound, insinuations, and

public opinion "to the sticking-place." I do not repent of having done so.

With respect to the spirit of partisanship in which the controversy respecting Mr. Kean's merits as an actor was carried on, there were two or three things remarkable. One set of persons, out of the excess of their unbounded admiration, furnished him with all sorts of excellences which he did not possess or pretend to, and covered his defects from the wardrobe of their own fancies. With this class of persons,

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Pritchard's genteel, and Garrick's six feet high!"

I never enlisted in this corps of Swiss bodyguards; I was even suspected of disloyalty and leze-majesté, because I did not cry out-Quand meme! to all Mr. Kean's stretches of the prerogatives of genius, and was placed out of the pale of theatrical orthodoxy for not subscribing implicitly to all the articles of belief imposed upon my senses and understanding. If you had not been to see the little man twenty times in Richard, and did not deny his being hoarse in the last act, or admire him for being so, you were looked on as a

lukewarm devotee, or half an infidel. On the other hand, his detractors constantly argued not from what he was, but from what he was not. "He was not tall. He had not a fine voice. He did not play at Covent Garden. He was not John Kemble." This was all you could get from them, and this they thought quite sufficient to prove that he was not any thing, because he was not something quite different from himself. They did not consider that an actor might have the eye of an eagle with the voice of a raven, a "pigmy body," and "a fiery soul that o'er-informed its tenement ;" that he might want grace and dignity, and yet have enough nature and passion in his breast to set up a whole corps of regular stagers. They did not enquire whether this was the case with respect to Mr. Kean, but took it for granted that it was not, for no other reason than because the question had not been settled by the critics twenty or thirty years ago, and admitted by the town ever since, that is, before Mr. Kean was born. A royal infant may be described as "un haut et puissant prince, agé d'un jour," but a great and powerful actor can