reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.”  This often-quoted sentence embodies perhaps the main feature of Edmund Kean’s greatness as an actor; for, when he was impersonating the heroes of our poet, he revealed their natures by an instant flash of light so searching that every minute feature, which by the ordinary light of day was hardly visible, stood bright and clear before you.  The effect of such acting was indeed that of lightning—­it appalled; the timid hid their eyes, and fashionable society shrank from such heart-piercing revelations of human passion.  Persons who had schooled themselves to control their emotion till they had scarcely any emotion left to control, were repelled rather than attracted by Kean’s relentless anatomy of all the strongest feeling of our nature.  In Sir Giles Overreach, a character almost devoid of poetry, Kean’s acting displayed with such powerful and relentless truth the depths of a cruel, avaricious man, baffled in all his vilest schemes, that the effect he produced was absolutely awful.  As no bird but the eagle can look without blinking on the sun, so none but those who in the sacred privacy of their imaginations had stood face to face with the mightiest storms of human passion could understand such a performance.  Byron, who had been almost forced into a quarrel with Kean by the actor’s disregard of the ordinary courtesies of society, could not restrain himself, but rushed behind the scenes and grasped the hand of the man to whom he felt that he owed a wonderful revelation.

I might discant for hours with an enthusiasm which, perhaps, only an actor could feel on the marvellous details of Kean’s impersonations.  He was not a scholar in the ordinary sense of the word, though Heaven knows he had been schooled by adversity, but I doubt if there ever was an actor who so thought out his part, who so closely studied with the inward eye of the artist the waves of emotion that might have agitated the minds of the beings whom he represented.  One hears of him during those early years of struggle and privation, pacing silently along the road, foot-sore and half-starved, but unconscious of his own sufferings, because he was immersed in the study of those great creations of Shakespeare’s genius which he was destined to endow with life upon the stage.  When you read of Edmund Kean as, alas! he was later on in life, with mental and physical powers impaired, think of the description those gave of him who knew him best in his earlier years; how amidst all the wildness and half-savage Bohemianism, which the miseries of his life had ensured, he displayed, time after time, the most large-hearted generosity, the tenderest kindness of which human nature is capable.  Think of him working with a concentrated energy for the one object which he sought, namely, to reach the highest distinction in his calling.  Think of him as sparing no mental or physical labor to attain this end, an end which seemed ever fading further and further from his grasp.