Who can read these instances of jealous self-watchfulness in our sweet Shakspeare, and dream of any congeniality between him and one that, by every tradition of him, appears to have been as mere a player as ever existed; to have had his mind tainted with the lowest players’ vices,—­envy and jealousy, and miserable cravings after applause; one who in the exercise of his profession was jealous even of the women-performers that stood in his way; a manager full of managerial tricks and stratagems and finesse; that any resemblance should be dreamed of between him and Shakspeare,—­Shakspeare, who, in the plenitude and consciousness of his own powers, could with that noble modesty, which we can neither imitate nor appreciate, express himself thus of his own sense of his own defects:—­

  “Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
  Featured like him, like him with friends possest;
  Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope.”

I am almost disposed to deny to Garrick the merit of being an admirer of Shakspeare?  A true lover of his excellences he certainly was not; for would any true lover of them have admitted into his matchless scenes such ribald trash as Tate and Cibber, and the rest of them, that

  “With their darkness durst affront his light,”

have foisted into the acting plays of Shakspeare?  I believe it impossible that he could have had a proper reverence for Shakspeare, and have condescended to go through that interpolated scene in Richard the Third, in which Richard tries to break his wife’s heart by telling her he loves another woman, and says, “if she survives this she is immortal.”  Yet I doubt not he delivered this vulgar stuff with as much anxiety of emphasis as any of the genuine parts:  and for acting, it is as well calculated as any.  But we have seen the part of Richard lately produce great fame to an actor by his manner of playing it; and it lets us into the secret of acting, and of popular judgments of Shakspeare derived from acting.  Not one of the spectators who have witnessed Mr. C.’s exertions in that part, but has come away with a proper conviction that Richard is a very wicked man, and kills little children in their beds, with something like the pleasure which the giants and ogres in children’s books are represented to have taken in that practice; moreover, that he is very close and shrewd, and devilish cunning, for you could see that by his eye.

But is, in fact, this the impression we have in reading the Richard of Shakspeare?  Do we feel anything like disgust, as we do at that butcherlike representation of him that passes for him on the stage?  A horror at his crimes blends with the effect which we feel, but how is it qualified, how is it carried off, by the rich intellect which he displays, his resources, his wit, his buoyant spirits, his vast knowledge and insight into characters, the poetry of his part,—­not an atom of all which is made perceivable in Mr. C.’s way of acting it.  Nothing but his crimes, his actions, is visible; they are prominent and staring; the murderer stands out, but where is the lofty genius, the man of vast capacity,—­the profound, the witty, accomplished Richard?