on of his
hearers.

Five years ago there was a weakness in Booth's voice, making the
listener apprehensive of the higher and louder tones. This insufficiency
has passed away with practice and growth, and his utterance now has
precisely the volume required in Hamlet,--being musical and distinct in
the quiet parts, and fully sustaining each emotional outburst.

In effective compositions there is a return to the theme or refrain of
the piece, when the end is close upon us. One of the finest points in
this play is, that after the successive episodes of the killing of
Polonius, the madness and death of Ophelia, and the wild bout with
Laertes at her burial, Hamlet reassumes his every-day nature, and is
never more thoroughly himself than when Osric summons him to the
fencing-match, and his heart grows ill with the shadow of coming death.
The Fates are just severing his thread; events that shall sweep a whole
dynasty, like the house of Atreus, into one common ruin, are close at
hand; but Philosophy hovers around her gallant child, and the sweet,
wise voice utters her teachings for the last time: "If it be now, 't is
not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet
it will come; the readiness is all. Let be." Then follow the courtesy,
the grace, the fraud, the justice, of the swift, last scene; the curtain
falls; and now the yearning sympathies of the hearers break out into
sound, and the actor comes before the footlights to receive his meed of
praise. How commonplace it is to read that such a one was called before
the curtain and bowed his thanks! But sit there; listen to the
applauding clamor of two thousand voices, be yourself lifted on the
waves of that exultation, and for a moment you forget how soon all this
will be hushed forever, and, in the triumph of the actor, the grander,
more enduring genius of the writer whose imagination first evoked the
spell.

The performance of Richelieu, from one point of view, is a complete
antithesis to that of the melancholy Dane. In the latter we see and
think of Booth; in the former, his household friends, watching My Lord
Cardinal from first to last, have nothing to recall him to their minds.
The man is transformed, is _acting_ throughout the play. Voice, form,
and countenance are changed; only the eyes remain, and they are volcanic
with strange lustre,--mindful of the past, suspicious of the present,
fixed still upon the future with piercing intent. The soul o