The words fire, energy,
_abandon_, found in him unprecedented meanings. I never heard a
speaker or actor who could give such a sting to hauteur or the taunt.
I never heard from any other the charm of unswervingly perfect
vocalization without trenching at all on mere melody, the province of
music.
So much for a Thespian temple of New York fifty years since, where
"sceptred tragedy went trailing by" under the gaze of the Dry Dock
youth, and both players and auditors were of a character and like we
shall never see again. And so much for the grandest histrion of modern
times, as near as I can deliberately judge (and the phrenologists put
my "caution" at 7)--grander, I believe, than Kean in the expression
of electric passion, the prime eligibility of the tragic artist.
For though those brilliant years had many fine and even magnificent
actors, undoubtedly at Booth's death (in 1852) went the last and by
far the noblest Roman of them all.
NOTES TO LATE ENGLISH BOOKS
PREFACE TO THE READER IN THE BRITISH ISLANDS--"_Specimen Days in
America"
London Edition, June 1887_ If you will only take the following pages,
as you do some long and gossippy letter written for you by a relative
or friend travelling through distant scenes and incidents and jotting
them down lazily and informally, but ever veraciously (with occasional
diversion of critical thought about sombody or something,) it might
remove all formal or literary impediments at once, and bring you and
me closer together in the spirt in which the jottings were collated to
be read.
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