asion, among his
audience was Mrs. Charles Kemble. During this engagement he played
Arthur to Kemble's King John and Mrs. Siddon's Constance, and appears
to have made a great success. Soon after this, his uncle Moses
died suddenly, and young Kean was left to the severe but kindly
guardianship of Miss Tidswell. We cannot follow him through all the
vicissitudes of his early career. The sketch I have given of his early
life--ample details of which may be found in Mrs. Hawkins's _Life of
Edmund Kean_--will give you a sufficient idea of what he must have
endured and suffered. When, years afterwards, the passionate love of
Shakespeare, which, without exaggeration, we may say he showed almost
from his cradle, had reaped its own reward in the wonderful success
which he achieved, if we find him then averse to respectable
conventionality, erratic, and even dissipated in his habits, let us
mercifully remember the bitter and degrading suffering which he passed
through in his childhood, and not judge too harshly the great actor.
Unlike those whose lives we have hitherto considered, he knew none of
the softening influences of a home; to him the very name of mother,
instead of recalling every tender and affectionate feeling, was but
the symbol of a vague horror, the fountain of that degradation and
depravation of his nature, from which no subsequent prosperity could
ever redeem it.

For many years after his boyhood his life was one of continual
hardship. With that unsubdued conviction of his own powers, which
often is the sole consolation of genius, he toiled on and bravely
struggled through the sordid miseries of a strolling player's life.
The road to success lies through many a thorny course, across many a
dreary stretch of desert land, over many an obstacle, from which the
fainting heart is often tempted to turn back. But hope, and the sense
of power within, which no discouragements can subdue, inspire the
struggling artist still to continue the conflict, till at last courage
and perseverance meet with their just reward, and success comes. The
only feeling then to which the triumphant artist may be tempted is one
of good-natured contempt for those who are so ready to applaud those
merits which, in the past, they were too blind to recognize. Edmund
Kean was twenty-seven years old before his day of triumph came.

Without any preliminary puffs, without any flourish of trumpets, on
the evening of the 26th January, 1814, soaked throug