which were often sufficiently amusing to the bystanders from the contrast between the old-fashioned violence of the language and the refined tones and lofty bearing of the speaker.  In fact, so foreign were such displays to the dominant qualities of his character, while yet so closely connected with the fine sense and exacting spirit of the artist, that one is tempted to wish that he could himself have viewed them with more indifference, accepting this thorn in the flesh as a slight but irremediable misfortune, instead of making it the constant subject of penitence and self-abasement.  But such a course would have been still more foreign to his nature, ever aiming at perfection, moral and artistic, ever summoning his faculties and actions to the stern inquest of conscience, and refusing to accept the verdict of any lower tribunal.  And the struggle had its reward in a real if not complete victory.  The weeds, if never wholly eradicated, could not choke the nobler growth; the stream, if it retained its turbid coloring, increased always in volume and majesty.  The fine qualities which might so easily have deteriorated remained unscathed.  His keen sense of justice and honor, his inborn candor and generosity, his fervent love of virtue and goodness in their simplest and least obtrusive exhibitions, his cordial admiration of true greatness,—­these and kindred traits never lost their freshness or force.  Above all, he retained throughout life that deep and exquisite tenderness of feeling which formed the supreme charm of his character, as it did of his acting, and to which it would not, we think, be easy to find a parallel in a person of his own sex.  It was not alone in his ardent family affections—­his fond recollections of the mother he lost in boyhood, his devotion to his sister, wife and brother, his passionate love of his children, or his anguish and abiding sorrow at every severance of such ties—­that this quality displayed itself.  His sympathy with all suffering, especially if conjoined with innocence and patient endurance, was not only quick but strong.  His eyes fill with tears at the sight of a fellow-passenger in a mail-coach, a poor deformed boy, who is carrying a basket of toys from one town to another, and he shakes his hand at parting with a “God bless thee!” that comes direct from the heart.  It was strikingly characteristic of him that, with all his intense ambition, his resolute desire—­to use a phrase which we have heard him apply to himself—­“to rise above the crowd, and stand when others fall,” he chose for his wife a young provincial actress, whom he had once chided for her inattention or inability, but whose artlessness of manner, purity and sweetness of nature and aptness for improvement so enlisted his sympathies that he constituted himself her friend and guide until the death of her father and brother awakened a still warmer solicitude, bringing with it the discovery that “love had been the inspiration of all the counsel and assistance he had rendered her.”  Nor is the noble frankness less noticeable with which he tells of his sister’s unconcealed disappointment on her first introduction to the fiancee, whose person as well as mind he had so extolled in his descriptions and whom happily she learned ere long to look at with his eyes, so that the happiness and serenity of his home were destined to be pure and undisturbed.