d in theatrical
annals. Since then Henry Irving, in London, has acted Hamlet two hundred
consecutive times in one season; but this latter achievement, in the
present day and in the capital city of the world, was less difficult
than Edwin Booth's exploit, performed in turbulent New York in the
closing months of the terrible civil war.

The elder Booth was a short, spare, muscular man, with a splendid chest,
a symmetrical Greek head, a pale countenance, a voice of wonderful
compass and thrilling power, dark hair, and blue eyes. His son's
resemblance to him is chiefly obvious in the shape of the head and face,
the arch and curve of the heavy eyebrows, the radiant and constantly
shifting light of expression that animates the countenance, the natural
grace of carriage, and the celerity of movement. Booth's eyes are dark
brown, and seem to turn black in moments of excitement, and they are
capable of conveying, with electrical effect, the most diverse
meanings--the solemnity of lofty thought, the tenderness of affection,
the piteousness of forlorn sorrow, the awful sense of spiritual
surroundings, the woful weariness of despair, the mocking glee of wicked
sarcasm, the vindictive menace of sinister purpose, and the lightning
glare of baleful wrath. In range of facial expressiveness his
countenance is thus fully equal to that of his father. The present
writer saw the elder Booth but once, and then in a comparatively
inferior part--Pescara, in Shiel's ferocious tragedy of _The Apostate_.
He was a terrible presence. He was the incarnation of smooth, specious,
malignant, hellish rapacity. His exultant malice seemed to buoy him
above the ground. He floated rather than walked. His glance was deadly.
His clear, high, cutting, measured tone was the exasperating note of
hideous cruelty. He was acting a fiend then, and making the monster not
only possible but actual. He certainly gave a greater impression of
overwhelming power than is given by Edwin Booth, and seemed a more
formidable and tremendous man. But his face was not more brilliant than
that of his renowned son; and in fact it was, if anything, somewhat less
splendid in power of the eye. There is a book about him, called _The
Tragedian_, written by Thomas R. Gould, who also made a noble bust of
him in marble; and those who never saw him can obtain a good idea of
what sort of an actor he was by reading that book. It conveys the image
of a greater actor, but not a more brilliant on