we touch lightly the pathos of the chamber scene which follows the arrival of Cordelia. His return to soundness of mind, in the appeasing presence of his one true daughter, was as subtle, tender, and graduated, as the departure had been violent and willful. Never, even from his mouth, have we heard a more pathetic utterance, than he gave to the line

"If you have poison for me I will drink it."

Not only was it filled with music, but with the remorseful humility of a bruised heroic heart.

Our notes on Booth's Lear must here close abruptly. The last scene, the great scene for sounding the inmost depths of human feeling, not only in this play, but in all dramatic literature, was left out. Booth played Tate's Lear. It does not lessen our chagrin to add that Garrick played at an earlier date, and Kean at a later, in that diversion on Shakespeare's grandest drama, which leaves out the indispensable Fool, and puts in the superfluous folly.

We have no fault to find with Booth's Lear so far as he followed Shakespeare. We sat at his feet. But his performance was a

magnificent fragment. It might be compared to that torso of Hercules, which Angelo so reverently studied, and which conveyed through its knotted and swayed outlines, the suggestion of a grief we may guess at, but which, in its fullness, must remain forever unexpressed.

CASSIUS.

.

In earlier years Mr. Booth assumed many minor characters of Shakespeare, which he afterwards surrendered, as Richard II., Hotspur, King John, Posthumous. There may still be found in London a print of him in the latter character. Cassius was the last part so surrendered. He played it in Boston, with Mr. Forrest as Brutus, about the year 1837.

Cassius was a Roman, whose subtle mind, restless spirit, and splenetic humor, allied him to the modern Italian, and showed some points of likeness to Iago. But when we name this " Italian fiend," the generous and constant friendship between Brutus and Cassius must of course be put from view. The noble head, the mobile features, the spare figure of Booth gave him a singular external fitness for the part. Perhaps no passage in any performance of his, transcended in colloquial style the well-known street scene with Brutus. His description of

himself and Cæsar swimming in the Tiber on that "raw and gusty day ;" and of Cæsar's sickness "when he was in Spain," were especially noteworthy. Booth's vivid portraiture recreated the event. He touched the arm of Brutus; leaned, but without undue familiarity, upon his shoulder. In the line

"His coward lips did from their color fly,"

Cassius, by a subtle reversion of the common phrase," the color fled from his lips," implies a sarcasm on Cæsar's quality as a soldier. Booth illustrated the meaning by a momentary gesture, as if carrying a standard. The movement was fine, as giving edge to the sarcasm, but pointed to a redundancy of action, which sometimes appeared in this great actor's personations; marking the excess in him, however, of those high histrionic powers, keen feeling and shaping imagination.

His Cassius was signalized by one action of characteristic excellence and originality. After Cæsar had been encompassed and stabbed by the conspirators, and lay extended on the floor of the Senate-house, Booth strode right across the dead body, and out of the scene, in silent and disdainful triumph.

SIR GILES OVERREACH.

OUT of Shakespeare, through Massinger, down to the lowest quarry to which his genius deigned to stoop to Payne, Colman, Otway, even to Sheil and Maturin, the path of our actor was a track of light; and, against the mass of dramatic dullness it sometimes met,

"Stuck fiery off indeed."

His "Sir Giles Overreach," in Massinger's play, "A New Way to pay Old Debts,' stands in our memory as a representation of singular solid force. We propose to relimn some of the bolder strokes, and hold a candle towards some of the finer touches of this artist's work. When he speaks of having, as servants to his daughter Margaret

"The ladies of errant knights decayed,"

he adds,

"There having ever been

More than a feud, a strange antipathy

Between us and true gentry,"

Booth infused into those two italicized words