go further, I shall not be followed.' There are disciples of Christ who, alas! speak thus in our days. I shall march alone if I am to be alone. I shall say, like the poet philosopher, 'I am a citizen of the centuries to come;' or rather I shall say, as the symbol of our faith: I believe in the resurrection of the dead,' in the resurrection of dead consciences, till that of dead bodies shall have taken place. I believe in the rejuvenation of worn-out institutions, but which must revive because they are necessary; in the triumph of vanquished principles, of truths obscured by those who combat them, and often by those who defend them. I believe in the final victory of truth and justice, and in the reign of God for ever on this earth.

HYACINTHE LOYSON.

AN EYE-WITNESS OF JOHN KEMBLE.

In May, 1817, Ludwig Tieck, critic, dramatist, and poet, visited England. He was then forty-four years old; his powers of mind and body at their best. Shakespeare was the one great object of his worship; and he justly regarded a personal acquaintance with the country and countrymen of the poet as indispensable for the systematic study of his works, and those of his contemporary dramatists, in which he was then engaged. Probably no Englishman, then living, was more conversant with the history of the English stage than Tieck. Of Burbage and Shakespeare's other fellow-actors, of Betterton, Booth, Quin, Macklin, Barry, Garrick, through whom its early traditions had passed, he knew all that the scanty records of our theatre had preserved; and he came to England with the natural hope that some traces of what their genius had done for the illustration of the supreme poet might be found in the great theatres with which their names were identified. It was hard—and it might well be so for a German enthusiast for the drama to believe that the great histrionic power in the actors of his own time, on which Shakespeare had relied to interpret his works to his countrymen, unaided by the splendour of scenic appointments, should not have left its mark upon their successors. In any case he might hope to see such of the poet's works as kept their hold upon the stage treated with the sympathetic reverence, which the loudly proclaimed admiration by the English for their greatest poet led him to expect, and which he had been accustomed to see applied to the acting of Shakespeare on the stages of Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden, and Vienna.

Tieck's first inquiry on reaching London was, whether the two great theatres of Covent Garden and Drury Lane were still open. It was late in the season, but, fortunately for his purpose, he was not only in time, but had come just as John Kemble was playing a series of his Shakespearean characters at Covent Garden, previous to taking his final leave of the stage. The great actor had begun these farewell performances on the 22nd of April, and had been playing on alternate nights up to the 30th of May, when Tieck first saw him. Never a very strong man, his health for some years had been a good

deal broken. A succession of thirty performances, within less than two months, which included King John, the Stranger, Coriolanus, Brutus in Julius Cæsar, Penruddock in The Wheel of Fortune, Hotspur, Cato, Hamlet, Zanga, Cardinal Wolsey, and Octavian in The Mountaineers, was enough to have exhausted the forces of a much younger man. Tieck, therefore, saw him at great disadvantage; and in reading the German critic's remarks, this circumstance. must, in justice to Kemble, be kept steadily in view. Much of the languor and slowness, which he found in the great actor, was due not so much to his habitual style, as to the constitutional asthma and physical weakness, which compelled him to husband his resources. The passages in his impersonations, which, as we shall see, wrung from Tieck a reluctant admission of their splendour, would be sufficient evidence of this, had we not known it from the lips and writings of others, who had the good fortune to be familiar with what Kemble had been, and to know him as he then was.

Tieck, whose own reading of Shakespeare subsequently became famous, had studied the actor's art in the critical school of which Lessing was the founder. He had, moreover, seen all the best acting of the German stage at a period rich in actors and actresses of great gifts and accomplishments. He had a right, therefore, to speak with authority; and before turning to what he has to say of the English stage it may not be amiss to illustrate, by his account of the great German actor, Fleck,' the high standard of excellence to which he could refer in judging of the leaders of the English school.

Fleck was slender, not tall, but of the finest proportions; he had brown eyes, whose fire was softened by gentleness, finely pencilled brows, a noble forehead and nose, and in youth his head resembled that of the Apollo. In the parts of Essex, Tancred, Ethelwolf, he was fascinating, especially so as the Infanta Don Pedro in Inez de Castro, a part written, like the whole piece, very feebly and vulgarly, but every word of which as spoken by him rang like the inspiration of a great poet. His voice had the purity of a bell and was rich in full clear tones, high as well as low, beyond what any one could believe who had not heard them; for in passages of tenderness, entreaty, or devotion, he had a flute-like softness at command. And, without ever falling into the grating bass, which often strikes so unpleasantly on our ear, his deep tones rang like metal, with a roll like thunder in suppressed rage, and a roar as of a lion in the unchecked tempest of passion. The tragedian for whom Shakespeare wrote, must, in my opinion, have possessed many of the qualities of Fleck, for those marvellous transitions, those interjections, those pauses, followed by a tempestuous torrent of words, no less than those side strokes and touches of

Johann Friedrich Fleck was born in 1757, appeared on the stage in 1777, rose rapidly to the first rank in his profession, and retained it till his death in 1801. He had the qualities of a fine figure, eyes, and voice, and of an expressive face, without which no actor of the poetic drama can be great. Humour, that other essential of the great actor, he seems also to have possessed in an eminent degree. His distinction among the actors of his time was the thoroughness of everything he did. He was not fine in passages, but left upon his audience the impression of a great whole, of characters, true and consistent as life itself.

nature, spontaneous, naive, nay sometimes verging on the comic, which he threw into his performance, were given with such natural truth, as to make us understand for the first time all the subtlety and peculiarity of the poet's pathos. When he appeared in any of his great impersonations, there was a halo of something supernatural about him, an impalpable horror went with him, and every tone, every look went through our heart. In the part of Lear I preferred him to the great Schröder, for he dealt with it more poetically and more truly to the poet, inasmuch as he laboured less visibly at the indications of coming madness, although when it came he exhibited it in all its appalling sublimity. To have seen his Othello was a great experience. In Macbeth Schröder may have surpassed him, for he gave the first Act without sufficient significance, and the second Act feebly, and with a want of decision, but from the third onwards he was incomparable, and in the fifth grand. His Shylock was full of a weird horror, never commonplace, but on the contrary noble throughout. Many of Schiller's characters were quite written for him but the triumph of his greatness, however great he might be in many of them, was the Robber Moor. To this Titan-like creation of a young and daring imagination he gave a terrible reality, a noble elevation; the ferocity was mingled with tenderness so touching, that the poet, when he saw it, must unquestionably have been struck with wonder at his own creation. Even the so-called character parts in the drama of everyday life Fleck played with distinction and spirit, infusing a humour into them, which made them most attractive.

For the sake of dramatic history, as well as of Kemble's reputation, it is a pity that so competent a critic as Tieck should not have seen the actor at his best. His report might then have claimed the same authority as the admirable account of Garrick in the last year of his public life, which is to be found in the German philosopher and critic Lichtenberg's letters from London to his friend Boye. Still, after making every allowance, there is much matter to be heard and learned' about Kemble and his contemporaries from the sketches, composed in a great measure from his London letters, which Tieck published in his Dramaturgische Blätter in 1826, but which have not hitherto been made known to English readers.

Barren although our stage unhappily is, for the time, of the powers, natural and acquired, which can alone do justice to the Shakespearean drama, Tieck's account of what he saw is not wholly without consolation for us. All was not so perfect in those so-called palmy days of the stage as some would have us believe. Bad acting was not uncommon then any more than now-as indeed, how can it ever be otherwise than common--the art being so difficult as it is? And although there were actors of great natural gifts, and who, by a lifetime of study and observation, had trained themselves to grapple with the great characters of the poetic drama, and to portray the high actions and high passions' by which they lifted delighted audiences into that ideal world, which after all seems to be the only real one, the stage of that period was far behind our own in this— that liberties of excision and addition were taken with the text of Shakespeare which would now be impossible, and that those accessories which give life and variety to the action of the scene were neglected to an extent as culpable in one way, as the excess in scenic splendour

and elaboration of costume to which we have of late years been accustomed, is objectionable in another.

The first play which Tieck saw at Covent Garden (May 30) was Cymbeline, which he justly calls the most charming of the poet's dramas.'

I was prepared to find (he says), owing to the length of the piece, and want of capacity in the actors who could not fill all the parts, much less fill them all well, that I should not see the whole play, and that much of what I should see would be performed in a mediocre style, for we are accustomed to this sort of thing, even in the case of weaker plays; but that there should be an absolute want of connection, and of illusion in many of the finest scenes, nay, that not so much as an attempt at this should be made-for this, I confess, I was not prepared. The whole was treated as a series of declamations, in which some things were spoken admirably, many gracefully, and much, very much, as stupidly as could be, without regard to the poet's meaning, or even to the elementary rules of elocution.

It frequently struck me as strange and ludicrous, that the performers should have adopted any costume, as they seemed in truth to ignore the fact that they were acting altogether. I felt this chiefly in those scenes, assuredly among the finest which even Shakespeare has written-I mean, those of that marvellous solitude, in which old Belarius, and the king's two stolen sons, Guiderius and Arviragus, appear. All the more that the poet has given peculiar richness of colour, and a glorious freshness to these scenes, did one feel outraged by seeing these youths deport themselves like two young Englishmen, who had dropped into the theatre for their amusement from the nearest tavern. This revolting kind of commonplace made havoc of these scenes, but the audience appeared to be unconscious of anything amiss.

The curtailments and alterations in the arrangement of this play for the stage have been made in the most reckless way, according to a prevailing usage with the English in such matters; for since adaptations of their poet (like Dryden's of the Tempest, and Shadwell's of Timon of Athens) are no longer represented, they are content with arbitrary abridgments, in which the play often becomes unintelligible, and the meaning of the poet is always sure to suffer. A general knowledge of the work is assumed; the most celebrated passages are allowed to stand; undue prominence is often given to the leading actors; unimportant scenes and speeches are taken from their place, and given to some favourite. One scene is lengthened out, by interpolations or dumb show, to very weariness, while other scenes are shortened or wholly omitted, although they are to carry on the action-in short, such violence is done to the author, that an unprejudiced observer finds it hard to reconcile this tyranny with the reverence and homage which the English seem to pay to their great poet whenever they can.

Those whose studies have not shown them, how deeply the vice here denounced by Tieck had penetrated into our acted Shakespearean drama, will read his statements with amazement. It was not, indeed, until long afterwards, when his management of Covent Garden, and subsequently of Drury Lane, enabled Mr. Macready to introduce a thorough system of reform, that the scandal was effectively abated. When, among other revivals, Cymbeline was produced by him, the play was probably, for the first time, seen upon the stage in something like its true proportions. Local colour and correct costumes were introduced, with a skilful reserve, to set off the fine acting of his powerful company. How reverently and beautifully