Street, Leicester Square, a queer character, who gained a precarious living by giving entertainments as a mimic and ventriloquist.  The uncle received his nephew warmly enough, and seems to have cultivated, to the best of his ability, the talent for acting which he recognized at once in the boy.  Edmund again enjoyed a kind of desultory education, partly carried on at school and partly at his uncle’s home, where he enjoyed the advantage of the kind instructions of his old friend, Miss Tidswell, of D’Egville, the dancing master, of Angelo, the fencing master, and of no less a person than Incledon, the celebrated singer, who seems to have taken the greatest interest in him.  But the vagrant, half-gypsy disposition, which he inherited from his mother, could never be subdued, and he was constantly disappearing from his uncle’s house for weeks together, which he would pass in going about from one roadside inn to another, amusing the guests with his acrobatic tricks, and his monkey-like imitations.  In vain was he locked up in rooms, the height of which from the ground was such as seemed to render escape impossible.  He contrived to get out somehow or other, even at the risk of his neck, and to make his escape to some fair, where he would earn a few pence by the exhibition of his varied accomplishments.  During these periods of vagabondism he would live on a mere nothing, sleeping in barns, or in the open air, and would faithfully bring back his gains to Uncle Moses.  But even this astounding generosity, appealing, as it must have done, to the uncle’s sentiments, could not appease him.  His uncle went so far, apparently with the concurrence of Miss Tidswell, as to place round the boy’s neck a brass collar with the inscription, “This boy belongs to No. 9 Lisle Street; please bring him home.”  His wandering propensities being for a time subdued, we find the little Edmund again engaged at Drury Lane, and delighting the actors in the green-room by giving recitations from Richard III., probably in imitation of Cooke; and, on one occasion, among his audience was Mrs. Charles Kemble.  During this engagement he played Arthur to Kemble’s King John and Mrs. Siddon’s Constance, and appears to have made a great success.  Soon after this, his uncle Moses died suddenly, and young Kean was left to the severe but kindly guardianship of Miss Tidswell.  We cannot follow him through all the vicissitudes of his early career.  The sketch I have given of his early life—­ample details of which may be found in Mrs. Hawkins’s Life of Edmund Kean—­will give you a sufficient idea of what he must have endured and suffered.  When, years afterwards, the passionate love of Shakespeare, which, without exaggeration, we may say he showed almost from his cradle, had reaped its own reward in the wonderful success which he achieved, if we find him then averse to respectable conventionality, erratic, and even dissipated in his habits, let us mercifully remember the bitter and degrading suffering