by their author, pen in hand, until, at the
end of a long succession of revisions, the pages came to be cobwebbed
over with a wonderfully intricate network of blots and lines in the way
of correction or of obliteration. Several of the leaves in this way,
what with the black letter-press on the white paper, being scored out or
interwoven with a tracery in red ink and blue ink alternately, present
to view a curiously parti-coloured or tesselated appearance. As a
specimen page, however, will afford a more vivid illustration upon
the instant of what is referred to, than could be conveyed by any mere
verbal description, a fac-simile is here introduced of a single page
taken from the "Reading of Little Dombey."

Whatever thought was lavished thus upon the composition of the Readings,
was lavished quite as unstintingly upon the manner of their delivery.
Thoroughly natural, impulsive, and seemingly artless, though that manner
always appeared at the moment, it is due to the Reader as an artist to
assert that it was throughout the result of a scarcely credible amount
of forethought and preparation. It is thus invariably indeed with every
great proficient in the histrionic art, even with those who are quite
erroneously supposed by the outer public to trust nearly everything
to the momentary impulses of genius, and who are therefore presumed to
disdain anything whatever in the way either of forethought or of actual
preparation by rehearsal.

According to what is, even down to this present day, very generally
conjectured, Edmund Kean, one of the greatest tragedians who ever trod
the stage, is popularly imagined to have always played simply, as might
be said, hap-hazard, trusting himself to the spur of the moment for
throwing himself into a part passionately;--the fact being exactly the
reverse in his regard, according to the earliest and most accurate
of his biographers. Erratic, fitful though the genius of Edmund Kean
unquestionably was--rendering him peerless as Othello, incomparable as
Overreach--we are told in Mr. Procter's life of him, that "he studied
long and anxiously," frequently until many hours after midnight.{*} No
matter what his occupations previously might have been, or how profound
his exhaustion through rehearsing in the forenoon, and performing in
the evening, and sharing in convivialities afterwards, Barry Cornwall
relates of him that he would often begin to study when his family had
retired for the night, practi