fashionable society shrank from such
heart-piercing revelations of human passion. Persons who had schooled
themselves to control their emotion till they had scarcely any
emotion left to control, were repelled rather than attracted by Kean's
relentless anatomy of all the strongest feeling of our nature. In Sir
Giles Overreach, a character almost devoid of poetry, Kean's acting
displayed with such powerful and relentless truth the depths of a
cruel, avaricious man, baffled in all his vilest schemes, that the
effect he produced was absolutely awful. As no bird but the eagle can
look without blinking on the sun, so none but those who in the
sacred privacy of their imaginations had stood face to face with the
mightiest storms of human passion could understand such a performance.
Byron, who had been almost forced into a quarrel with Kean by the
actor's disregard of the ordinary courtesies of society, could not
restrain himself, but rushed behind the scenes and grasped the hand of
the man to whom he felt that he owed a wonderful revelation.

I might discant for hours with an enthusiasm which, perhaps, only an
actor could feel on the marvellous details of Kean's impersonations.
He was not a scholar in the ordinary sense of the word, though Heaven
knows he had been schooled by adversity, but I doubt if there ever was
an actor who so thought out his part, who so closely studied with the
inward eye of the artist the waves of emotion that might have agitated
the minds of the beings whom he represented. One hears of him during
those early years of struggle and privation, pacing silently along
the road, foot-sore and half-starved, but unconscious of his own
sufferings, because he was immersed in the study of those great
creations of Shakespeare's genius which he was destined to endow with
life upon the stage. When you read of Edmund Kean as, alas! he was
later on in life, with mental and physical powers impaired, think of
the description those gave of him who knew him best in his earlier
years; how amidst all the wildness and half-savage Bohemianism, which
the miseries of his life had ensured, he displayed, time after time,
the most large-hearted generosity, the tenderest kindness of which
human nature is capable. Think of him working with a concentrated
energy for the one object which he sought, namely, to reach the
highest distinction in his calling. Think of him as sparing no mental
or physical labor to attain this end, an end wh