have got Cooke's style in acting," Kean once said, "but the public will
never know it, I am so much smaller." It was not the imitation of a
copyist; it was the spontaneous devotion and direction of a kindred
soul. The elder Booth saw Kean act, and although injured by a rivalry
that Kean did not hesitate to make malicious, admired him with honest
fervour. "I will yield Othello to him," he said, "but neither Richard
nor Sir Giles." Forrest thought Edmund Kean the greatest actor of the
age, and copied him, especially in Othello. Pathos, with all that it
implies, seems to have been Kean's special excellence. Terror was the
elder Booth's. Edwin Booth may be less than either, but he unites
attributes of both.

In the earlier part of his career Edwin Booth was accustomed to act Sir
Giles Overreach, Sir Edward Mortimer, Pescara, and a number of other
parts of the terrific order, that he has since discarded. He was fine in
every one of them. The first sound of his voice when, as Sir Edward
Mortimer, he was heard speaking off the scene, was eloquent of deep
suffering, concentrated will, and a strange, sombre, formidable
character. The sweet, exquisite, icy, infernal joy with which, as
Pescara, he told his rival that there should be "music" was almost
comical in its effect of terror: it drove the listener across the line
of tragical tension and made him hysterical with the grimness of a
deadly humour. His swift defiance to Lord Lovell, as Sir Giles, and
indeed the whole mighty and terrible action with which he carried that
scene--from "What, are you pale?" down to the grisly and horrid viper
pretence and reptile spasm of death--were simply tremendous. This was in
the days when his acting yet retained the exuberance of a youthful
spirit, before "the philosophic mind" had checked the headlong currents
of the blood or curbed imagination in its lawless flight. And those
parts not only admitted of bold colour and extravagant action but
demanded them. Even his Hamlet was touched with that elemental fire. Not
alone in the great junctures of the tragedy--the encounters with the
ghost, the parting with Ophelia, the climax of the play-scene, the
slaughter of poor old Polonius in delirious mistake for the king, and
the avouchment to Laertes in the graveyard--was he brilliant and
impetuous; but in almost everything that quality of temperament showed
itself, and here, of course, it was in excess. He no longer hurls the
pipe into the flies wh