urton lived, and had
there been no diverting war of sections to drown all else, Jefferson
would have come to his growth and taken his place as the first
serio-comic actor of his time.

Rip Van Winkle was an evolution. Jefferson's half-brother, Charles
Burke, had put together a sketchy melodrama in two acts and had played
in it, was playing in it when he died. After his Trenchard, Jefferson
turned himself loose in all sorts of parts, from Diggory to Mazeppa, a
famous burlesque, which he did to a turn, imitating the mock heroics of
the feminine horse marines, so popular in the equestrian drama of the
period, Adah Isaacs Menken, the beautiful and ill-fated, at their head.
Then he produced a version of Nicholas Nickleby, in which his Newman
Noggs took a more ambitious flight. These, however, were but the
avant-couriers of the immortal Rip.

Charles Burke's piece held close to the lines of Irving's legend. When
the vagabond returns from the mountains after the twenty years' sleep
Gretchen is dead. The apex is reached when the old man, sitting dazed
at a table in front of the tavern in the village of Falling Water, asks
after Derrick Van Beekman and Nick Vedder and other of his cronies. At
last, half twinkle of humor and half glimmer of dread, he gets himself
to the point of asking after Dame Van Winkle, and is told that she
has been dead these ten years. Then like a flash came that wonderful
Jeffersonian change of facial expression, and as the white head drops
upon the arms stretched before him on the table he says: "Well, she led
me a hard life, a hard life, but she was the wife of my bosom, she was
_meine frau!_"

I did not see the revised, or rather the newly-created and written, Rip
Van Winkle until Mr. Jefferson brought it to America and was playing
it at Niblo's Garden in New York. Between himself and Dion Boucicault a
drama carrying all the possibilities, all the lights and shadows of his
genius had been constructed. In the first act he sang a drinking song to
a wing accompaniment delightfully, adding much to the tone and color of
the situation. The exact reversal of the Lear suggestion in the last act
was an inspiration, his own and not Boucicault's. The weird scene in the
mountains fell in admirably with a certain weird note in the Jefferson
genius, and supplied the needed element of variety.

I always thought it a good acting play under any circumstances, but, in
his hands, matchless. He thought himself that th