conceptions to his means of execution; but Kean’s physical constitution was much better suited to express Shylock as Shylock should be expressed than my father’s.  My father attempts to make Shylock “poetical” (in the superficial sense), because that is the bias of his own mind in matters of art.  Classical purity and refinement of taste are his specialties as an actor, and neither power nor intensity.

Shylock’s master passion is not revenge, which is a savage, but avarice, which is a sordid motive.  His hatred is inspired more by defeated hope of gain and positive losses and threatened ventures, than by the personal insults and contumely he has received.

Avarice is an absolutely base passion, and a grand poetical character cannot consistently be raised upon such a foundation, nor can a nature be at once groveling and majestic.  Besides, Shakespeare has not made Shylock “poetical.”  The concentrated venom of his passion is prosaic in its vehement utterance—­close, concise, vigorous, logical, but not imaginative; and in the scenes where his evil nature escapes the web of his cunning caution, and he is stung to fury by his complicated losses, there is intense passion but no elevation in his language.

There is a vein of humor in Shylock.  A grim, bitter, sardonic flavor pervades the part, that blends naturally with the sordid thrift and shrewd, watchful, eager vigilance of the miser.  It infuses a terrible grotesqueness into his rage, and curdles one’s blood in the piercing, keen irony of his mocking humility to Antonio, and adds poignancy to the ferocity of his hideous revenge.  This Kean rendered admirably, and in this my father entirely fails, but it is an important element of the character.

My father is hard upon Kean’s defects because they are especially antagonistic to his artistic taste and tendency, but I think, too, there is a slight infusion of the vexation of unappreciated labor in my father’s criticism of Kean.  He forgets that power is universally felt and understood, and refinement seldom the one or the other, and for a thousand who applaud Kean’s “What, wouldst thou have a serpent sting thee twice?” probably not ten people are aware of his exquisite “nevertheless” in the reading of Antonio’s letter.  Most eyes can “see a church by daylight;” not many stop to look at the lights and shadows that are forever varying and adding to the beauty of its aspect.  I wonder how, being as well aware as my father is of all the fine work that escapes the eyes of the public, he can care for this kind of thing as he does.

Tuesday, 12th.—­We are having events at the theater, and not of a pleasant sort.  Mr. Brunton, the manager, is in “difficulties” (civilized plural for debt), and it seems that last night during the play one of his creditors put an execution into the theater, and laid violent hands upon the receipts, which, as it was my father’s