ved less reward and yet
deserved more than those on his former. Of five characters there were
four on which criticism can dwell with pleasure.

Marc Antony in Julius Caesar,
Alexander in the Rival Queens,
Orsino in Alfonso,
Pierre in Venice Preserved.

Mr. Cooper's Antony was, as usual, a chequer work of good and bad: one
beauty there was, however, which would atone for a thousand faults. We
have never seen any thing in histrionic excellence to surpass, few to
equal it. We mean when, in the first scene of the third act, after the
assassination of Caesar, he returned to the senate house, and, dropping
on one knee, hung over the mangled body: his attitude surpassed all
powers of description. Then when after gazing for a time in horror at
the corse, with his hands clasped in speechless agony, he looked to
heaven, as if appealing to its justice, and again turning to his
murdered friend, exclaimed----

O mighty Caesar!----Dost thou lie so low?
Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils
Shrunk to this little measure?--Fare thee well.

All the conflicting passions, and excruciating feelings which Antony can
be supposed to have felt on that awful occasion--astonishment, fear,
suspicion, grief, tender affection, indignation, and horror seem rising
in tumultuous confusion in his face, and glared and flashed in his eyes.
And though Mr. Cooper less than any actor of equal merit that we
recollect affects the heart in pathetic passages, we only do him justice
in declaring that we have rarely known the feelings of an audience so
forcibly or successively appealed to, as by him in the last words: "Fare
thee well."

Through the whole of that scene Mr. Cooper was truly admirable. In the
speech in which he shakes the conspirators by their bloody hands, and,
like a consummate, artful politician, postpones the indulgence of his
grief and indignation for the accomplishment of a higher purpose, he was
not excelled by Barry himself. But in the harangue from the Rostrum he
missed the mark by aiming too high. Could he forget that that celebrated
speech is considered the chief test of the performer of Antony, he
would, we think, deliver it well; but, intent upon making the most of
it, he failed, and was laboriously erroneous and defective.

In the last speech beginning "This was the noblest Roman of them all"
Mr. Cooper was censurable. If he had ever committed it to memory, he had
now forgotten it, and om