tchfulness in our sweet
Shakespeare, 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 Shakespeare,--Shakespeare 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,
Featur'd 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 Shakespeare. 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 Shakespeare? I believe it
impossible that he could have had a proper reverence for Shakespeare,
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 judgements of
Shakespeare 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
Shakespeare? Do