raws around her that Church's
"awful circle," and cries to Baradas,

"Set but a foot within that holy ground,
And on thy head--yea, though it wore a crown--
_I launch the curse of Rome!_"

Booth's expression of this climax is wonderful. There is perhaps
nothing, of its own kind, to equal it upon the present stage. Well may
the king's haughty parasites cower, and shrink aghast from the ominous
voice, the finger of doom, the arrows of those lurid, unbearable eyes!
But it is in certain intellectual elements and pathetic undertones that
the part of Richelieu, as conceived by Bulwer, assimilates to that of
Hamlet, and comes within the realm where our actor's genius holds
assured sway. The argument of the piece is spiritual power. The body of
Richelieu is wasted, but the soul remains unscathed, with all its
reason, passion, and indomitable will. He is still prelate, statesman,
and poet, and equal to a world in arms.

The requisite subtilty of analysis, and sympathy with mental finesse,
must also specially adapt this actor to the correct assumption of the
character of Iago. Those who have never seen him in it may know by
analogy that his merits are not exaggerated. We take it that Iago is a
sharply intellectual personage, though his logic, warped by grovelling
purpose, becomes sophistry, while lustful and envious intrigues occupy
his skilful brain. We have described the beauty of Booth's countenance
in repose. But it is equally remarkable for mobility, and his most
expressive results are produced by liftings of the high-arched brows and
the play of passions about the flexible mouth. The natural line of his
lip, not scornful in itself, is on that straight border-ground where a
hair's breadth can raise it into sardonic curves, transforming all its
good to sneering evil. In his rendering, Iago must become a shining,
central incarnation of tempting deceit, with Othello's generous nature a
mere puppet in his hands. As Richard III., we should look to find him
most effective in schemeful soliloquy and the phases of assumed virtue
and affection, while perhaps less eminent than his father or Edmund Kean
in that headlong, strident unrest, which hurried on their
representations to the fury or the retributive end.

To give the distant reader our own impression of a great actor is a slow
and delicate task, and perhaps the most we can accomplish is to set him
before others somewhat as he has appeared to us, and to let each d