tic art was especially
puissant. He was the first actor of Lear to discriminate between the
agony of a man while going mad and the careless, volatile, fantastic
condition--afflicting to witness, but no longer agonising to the lunatic
himself--of a man who has actually lapsed into madness. Edwin
Forrest--whose Lear is much extolled, often by persons who, evidently,
never saw it--much as he did with the part, never even faintly suggested
such a discrimination as that.

To one altitude of Lear's condition it is probably impossible for
dramatic art to rise--the mood of divine philosophy, warmed with human
tenderness, in which the dazed but semi-conscious vicegerent of heaven
moralises over human life. There is a grandeur in that conception so
vast that nothing short of the rarest inspiration of genius can rise to
it. The deficiences of McCullough's Lear were found in the analysis of
that part of the performance. He had the heart of Lear, the royalty, the
breadth; but not all of either the exalted intellect, the sorrow-laden
experience, or the imagination--so gorgeous in its disorder, so
infinitely pathetic in its misery.

His performance of Lear signally exemplified, through every phase of
passion, that temperance which should give it smoothness. The treatment
of the curse scene, in particular, was extraordinarily beautiful for the
low, sweet, and tender melody of the voice, broken only now and
then--and rightly broken--with the harsh accents of wrath. Gentleness
never accomplished more, as to taste and pathos, than in McCullough's
utterance of "I gave you all," and "I'll go with you." The rallying of
the broken spirit after that, and the terrific outburst, "I'll not
weep," had an appalling effect. The recognition of Cordelia was simply
tender, and the death scene lovely in pathos and solemn and affecting in
tragic climax.

Throughout _Othello_ and _King Lear_ McCullough's powers were seen to be
curbed and guided, not by a cold and formal design but by a grave and
sweet gentleness of mind, always a part of his nature, but more and more
developed by the stress of experience, by the reactionary subduing
influence of noble success, and by the definite consciousness of power.
He found no difficulty in portraying the misery of Othello and of Lear,
because this is a form of misery that flows out of laceration of the
heart, and not from the more subtle wounds that are inflicted upon the
spirit through the imagination. There was