lings are well disposed of, and his time usefully and improvingly employed.

There are, indeed, two species of this class; the one just described, all of picture and pantomime discretion; the other, who, with similar tastes, combines a susceptibility to poetical beauty, philosophical maxim, and Shakspeare's verbal aptness: he is of the first class, united to the first division of the second class. He, with the pantomime and spectacular action, receives the added pleasure of hearing his favourite language declaimed whether with truth of perception and feeling matters not; the actor must be sure to make him hear it. This auditor may congratulate himself on a trifling extraction from his purse, and three hours so charmingly occupied. The language may be now more deeply cut on the tablets of his memory.

From any of the forementioned will be elicited some sympathy with the story or the events of the play. The varying condition of the persons whose fortunes, dilemmas, passions, and feelings form the groundwork of the fable, will, more or less, as spectators may be morally and intellectually constituted, kindle an interest with the passing action, superadded to the pleasure of listening to the poetry and the precepts, which, to him of the first class, is the principal attraction, or to the spectacular enjoyment of the second class; though much more exalted will be his pleasure, more ready and expansive his sympathies, who, of the second class, combines the moral qualities of the first, viz. the disposition to poetic beauty and expressive language. No auditor is altogether destitute of these sympathies. But there is a third class of readers to whom the tale, the links of events, and the catastrophe or the dénouement, the What is it about? what will come of this?' are the only objects of reading, or going to see after such reading; for them the seeing will still possess the freshness of novelty. Perhaps this playgoer has less of the philosophically dramatie spirit in him when he enters the theatre than any of the former classes; but he is likely to quit it with more of the germs of true thought than they are. An unanticipated mingling of his senses in the excitements of sorrow and circumstances of suffering which pass under his gaze, will enfold him in the enduring bonds of sympathy, and lay to his heart a lesson on which he will ponder long and fruitfully. Often, without perceiving how the spirit to do so has grown in him, he will be led to trace effect up to cause, and from cause to go on to consequence; thus imbibing a store of knowledge, which, while it induces a habit of thinking, and quickens his perceptions, will be lastingly beneficial in soothing many corrosions of thought towards his fellows. Probably he will not like the Merchant of Venice, because Shylock is so remorselessly cruel; or Othello, for that Iago is so deceitful a villain; and Richard the Third may be no favourite with him, because there is in that play such

a

The error,

an exhibition of reckless and ferocious tyranny. however, to which such an one is most liable, is in taking his first impressions of the acting of a character as the standard by which he ought to estimate all future representations of the same; especially when playhouse applause or public report, not less frequently ill-adjudged than fairly awarded, has stamped the actor with tower mark' of current excellence. He will condemn another who shall give a picture unlike the first he saw, or finding in it a resemblance to his favourite, the aforesaid first, will wisely detect a mere imitation; and either of the seconclusions may be erroneous. Nevertheless, he has seen the play; and among the barren-thoughted, the merely curious of this class, are many to whom such seeing is a qualification for criticism: as those who take a trip to Brighton will return to London and talk of the vast ocean' with as much profundity of wisdom as if they had fathomed its lowest bed, or traversed its furthest remotenesses. Still each and all will enjoy an instructive delight for the price they pay for admission to a theatre when one of Shakspeare's dramas is performed.

There is a fourth class distinct from all the former, although, like the second, one of this class marshals under his mind's eye the scenes, actions, movements of the beings whose thoughts, purposes, and sensations his body's eye peruses on the figured page; equally with the first he is susceptible of poetic beauties and expressive forms of speech, and the philosophic or literary spirit which awakes his desire, and kindles his admiration as he hears them from living lips. Yet must he hear them with truth's and passion's soul-convincing tones: to him a barren declamation is barren-it is unendurable; and to him no orderly-marshalled emphases, no liquidity of undulation, no accurately-balanced cadence, and crescendo floatings, and measured mellowness of modulation, will compensate for the absence of nature's true eloquence which absence his ear and heart detect immediately; and sweetness of tone,' when the feeling does not give such a tone, is to him as harsh as saw-grinding, or the wheezing of a dry pump-valve. With the readiest and the warmest of the third class, also, his sympathies arise with the tale, and flow with the exhibited feelings before him; but he will hear with indifference many things which receive their and the whole theatre's loudest acclamations, and be enraptured with others which pass unnoticed by the multitude. Each passion and emotion touches a responding chord in his own frame, and his reason pays approving homage to the judgment of his senses. But, beyond all these, he holds at will a metempsychosis, which being, perhaps, unappreciable by, inconceivable to, the other classes, will be doubted, unrecognised by them: or with some will be stoutly denied. if it

known to many, no one is entirely destitute of this faculty. All are at liberty to express liking or disliking for an actor; but let no one who has not repeatedly and freely exercised this faculty, suppose he is a judge of an actor's powers. In him, of this fourth class, the currents of thought course through the veins; the impressions which his mind receives will, if he choose they should, cast over his exterior the variations, the colourings, the lights and shadows of a possessed and embodied sense, a reality. Exciting, at volition, the impulses of his imagination, the aspirations, feelings, passions, and characteristics of another, take life and action in his own frame, spread through the intricate mazes, the stems, branches, and fibres of his physical organization, and he holds a second existence within his own-his first; and he can throw it off, or take it on, at will. He is endowed, let me say in parenthesis, with the moral, intellectual, and physical organization, that make the fountain source from which alone an actor's efficiencies of beauty, power, and excellence can emanate; the centre from which all his art radiates, and round which his glory revolves. Yet there have been hundreds of the profession who were ignorant of this truth, who knew not of its existence, nor dreamed that it was indispensable in their art; and some who have stood aloft in the public gaze, and been worshipped as wonders, who never displayed an atom of such organization; never exercised it themselves, and could not comprehend how it existed in others: but they passed with the world as great actors; professors they were, if you please, reader. I have said this distinguishing faculty is by the fourth class called into operation at will. So in the actor's moments of highest excitement, in the reeling and convulsions of suffering, when mind and frame both seem wrenched and torn by conflicting and distracting throes of agony; it is then that the intellectual senses are more rapid and acute in their action; it is then that he has the most perfect control over his powers; I mean this of the true actor; for every function of mind is gathered in and concentrated to the office for which he would employ them; and, in opposition to the general belief, I venture to assert that this true actor is at such moments more vigorously sensible, more minutely perceptible of the points of skill which his imagination and impulses have tasked to the execution of the scene, than at other times and moments in which there is little appearance of excitement; that is to say, when his 'madness' rages highest he is most rational, (for such things are madness' to dull-brained fools.) This may seem paradoxical; but it may be explained in a knowledge of that volition of double existence of which I have spoken. To proceed-of this fourth class of readers of Shakspeare's dramas; to one of these the completest results of the labours of otherways combined skill, the display of all that ever was waved forth from the hand of a Stanfield, a Grieve, or a Roberts, or from their united mastery of

art; with all the gorgeousness of procession, the richness and right of costume, ay, though the wand of an enchanter should throw over the whole theatre a blaze of beauty and splendour which would shame the creations of fancy and imagination, all would be as nothing, all from him will vanish before that more attractive vision, one single truth of developement of human character and human passion, one just portraiture of intellect working at the heart and through the frame of man; to that one thing alone will every faculty of eye, ear, and thought be fascinated and enchained. He can value not less than the former classes all that draws their best attention; but his greater aptitude to man's illustration of man supersedes all other claims on him; and green baize for scenery, with no other wardrobe than such as leaves the frame to free action and expression, would have more charms for him, while the devices of mind and heart were visibly at work together in the actor, than all which decoration or embellishment can substitute in a baldness of verbosity, for a negation of passion, an obscuration of the poetry of thought, an unphilosophical mentality, or undiscriminated tinges and depths of character. Let him have character, embodied conceptions and emotions expressed with nature's truth, or passion harmoniously rising and beating with events, and (all his nicety of appreciation of other adjuncts notwithstanding) he will submerge and forgive the pettier offences of inappropriate costume or anachronisms, and time and place oppositions and blunderings, even though they should so far violate proprieties as to make Nilus and the Pyramids march over to the walls of Corioli, or permit St. Peter's church to elevate its head above ruined triumphal arches sixteen centuries before a stone of it was digged from the quarries, or the herald of king George the Fourth to blow his trumpet for king John under the walls of Angiers. To diminish the number of this class throughout England, is the great aim of Mr. Bunn's theatrical economy; to sicken the few germs of taste and feeling for the true dramatic art in the other classes, is his glorious policy. But Mr. Bunn is not the first worker; he did not originate this crime against genius, and elevated thought, and improving delight, though his ardour and industry, now he has taken up the trade, are much greater than any of his predecessors evinced. Messieurs the public, it was in your power to check it when it commenced; the fault is yours that it speeds so rapidly. I will tell you why by and by. Still there remains enough to meet the strongest desires of this class. No actor whom I have yet seen is so endowed to meet them as is Macready. Whosoever of them saw him in King John on Monday evening, December 9, will believe my assertion.

On a future occasion I shall cast my eye over Hamlet, as he lived in, and came from Macready. If people would anatomize character and feelings, and so learn to trace their links and

affinities, before they decided on the quality of the whole, and with such schooling go forth to watch an actor's process, especially in this character, there would be hundreds, thousands, (nay, very few dissentients in the million,) who, in spite of predilections, old likings, or ecstasies of admiration, would soon confess their acquiescence in what I here declare as a wellconsidered conviction, that there have been men of renown' in Hamlet who did not exhibit so much understanding of the true man, so much of his mind, or conception of his intellectual and physical organization, and power of thinking, so much of the true poetic spirit of dramatic life through the whole five acts, gathered in one mass, as Macready evinces in rocking his head, with such a volume of meaning, thought, feeling, and expectation in his look, as he paces to and fro when the king, queen, and courtiers are assembling to witness the play; or in a single passage in the short scene with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern after the play. Their old favourites were good somethings; agreeable, interesting, delightful, may be, after a fashion-Hamlets they were not. But my present office is with King John.

From first to last-and I have surveyed the whole again and again, before I would permit the impressions which I took to be set down; or suffered the impulses which then threw me onwards, to guide me in this, ere I had examined them and balanced each in the scales of calmer reason, to ascertain their origin and their value;-from first to last there was not one glimmering of a conventional acquiescence, no vague adoption of a prescripted form; no tame yielding to the conceptions of predecessors in the part, however honoured they may have been by public applause, or the judgment of critics-there was not a twinkle of a reflection from memory: all was entirely conception-his conception-the flame of intellectual light which his own eye had thrown upon-into, the character; and the exhibition of that strong grasp, which imagination, creating a secondary existence, had taken upon his frame. When the curtain drew up and showed him sitting in state to receive the French embassy, to say he looked the character' is poorly prating in conventional parlance. It was himself—John -in breathing corporeality. Of this completeness of personal transmutation, the spectators must have been sensible; and before he had spoken six lines, it was felt that the mind also of King John was working in that frame: moving under that selfish irritability which the poet has made a prominent feature in the character. I was so near that I could trace the quiver of the lip, and turn of the eye-lids, and I saw that thought had created the emotion which stirred them. The face flushed and paled in the coming, present, and passing sense; and when the actor sprang from his attitude of assumed diguity, at the stronger dictates of his passion, to retort the defiance of Chatillon, it was at once perceived that he did not intend to curb himself by established