the whole man. The patrician pride of Coriolanus, the
stoicism of Brutus and Cato, the rapid and hurried vehemence
of Hotspur, mark the class of characters I mean. But he
fails where a ready and pliable yielding to the events and
passions of life makes what may be termed a more natural
personage. Accordingly I think his Macbeth, Lear, and
especially his Richard, inferior in spirit and truth. In
Hamlet, the natural fixed melancholy of the prince places
him within Kemble's range;--yet many delicate and sudden
turns of passion slip through his fingers. He is {p.155} a
lordly vessel, goodly and magnificent when going large
before the wind, but wanting the facility to go "_ready
about_," so that he is sometimes among the breakers before
he can wear ship. Yet we lose in him a most excellent
critic, an accomplished scholar, and one who graced our
forlorn drama with what little it has left of good sense and
gentlemanlike feeling. And so exit he. He made me write some
lines to speak when he withdraws, and he has been here
criticising and correcting till he got them quite to his
mind, which has rather tired me.

Most truly yours while

Walter SCOTT.

On the 29th of March, 1817, John Philip Kemble, after going through
the round of his chief parts, to the delight of the Edinburgh
audience, took his final leave of them as Macbeth, and in the costume
of that character delivered a farewell address, penned for him by
Scott.[61] No one who witnessed that scene, and heard the lines as
then recited, can ever expect to be again interested to the same
extent by anything occurring within the walls {p.156} of a theatre;
nor was I ever present at any public dinner in all its circumstances
more impressive than was that which occurred a few days afterwards,
when Kemble's Scotch friends and admirers assembled around
him--Francis Jeffrey being chairman, Walter Scott and John Wilson the
croupiers.

[Footnote 61: See _Poetical Works_, vol. xi. p. 348
[Cambridge Ed. p. 436]. Scott's farewell for Kemble
first appeared in _The Sale-Room_ for April 5, 1817; and
in the introductory note James Ballantyne says: "The
character fixed upon, with happy propriety, for Kemble's
closing scene, was Macbeth. He had labored under a