approaches.  The great scene with Tubal was a revelation of such originality and of such terrible force as had not probably been seen upon those boards before.  “How the devil so few of them could kick up such a row was something marvellous!” naively remarked Oxberry.  At the end of the third act every one was ready to pay court to him; but again he held aloof.  All his thoughts were concentrated on the great “trial” scene, which was coming.  In that scene the wonderful variety of his acting completed his triumph.  Trembling with excitement, he resumed his half-dried clothes, and, glad to escape, rushed home.  He was in too great a state of ecstasy at first to speak, but his face told his wife that he had realized his dream—­that he had appeared on the stage of Drury Lane, and that his great powers had been instantly acknowledged.  With not a shadow of doubt as to his future, he exclaimed, “Mary, you shall ride in your carriage;” and taking his baby boy from the cradle and kissing him, said, “and Charley, my boy, you shall go to Eton,”—­and he did.

The time when Edmund Kean made his first appearance in London was certainly favorable for an actor of genius.  For a long while the national theatre had been in a bad way; and nothing but failure had hitherto met the efforts of the Committee of Management, a committee which numbered among its members Lord Byron.  When the other members of the committee, with a strange blindness to their own interests, proposed that for the present, Kean’s name should be removed from the bills, Byron interested himself on his behalf:  “You have a great genius among you,” he said, “and you do not know it.”  On Kean’s second appearance the house was nearly doubled.  Hazlitt’s criticism had roused the whole body of critics, and they were all there to sit in judgment upon the newcomer.  His utter indifference to the audience won him their respect, and before the piece was half over the sentence of the formidable tribunal was in his favor.  From that moment Kean exercised over his audiences a fascination which was probably never exercised by any other actor.  Garrick was no doubt his superior in parts of high comedy; he was more polished, more vivacious—­his manner more distinguished, and his versatility more striking.  In such parts as Coriolanus or Rolla, John Kemble excelled him:  but in Shylock, in Richard, in Iago, and, above all, in Othello, it may be doubted whether Edmund Kean ever had an equal.  As far as one can judge—­not having seen Kean one’s-self—­from the many criticisms extant, written by the most intellectual men, and from the accounts of those who saw him in his prime, he was, to my mind—­be it said without any disparagement to other great actors—­the greatest genius that our stage has ever seen.  Unequal he may have been, perhaps often so, but there were moments in his acting which were, without exaggeration, moments of inspiration.  Coleridge is reported to have said that to see Kean act was “like