-ground. The whip that is made of golden wire hurts quite as much, I
opine, as the cowhide. And when, at last, the fortunate man cries out,
"I am rich, I have enough, _Sat me lusistis, ludite nunc alios_, I will
work and fret myself no more, I will retire on my dividends, and sit me
down under my own fig-tree,"--Fortune dismisses him with a sneer:
"Retire, if you like!" cries the implacable, "but take hypochondria and
_ennui_, take gout and the palsy, with you."

I should be infinitely rejoiced to hear, when I go back, that Robson is
once more a hale and valid man. It is the tritest of platitudes to say
that he could ill be spared by the English stage. We never _can_ spare a
good actor. As well can we spare a good book or a good picture. But
there would be much cause for gratulation, if Robson were spared, ere
his powers definitively decline, to visit the United States. The
American people ought to see Robson. They have had our tragedians, good,
bad, and indifferent. They have filled the pockets of William Macready
and of Charles Kean with dollars. They have heard our men-singers and
our women-singers,--the birds that can sing, and the birds that can't
sing, but _will_ sing. The most notable of our drolls, Buckstone and
Keeley, have been here, and have received a cordial welcome. But Robson
has hitherto been lacking on this side the Atlantic. That he would be
thoroughly appreciated by the theatrical public of America I cannot for
one instant doubt. It is given to England to produce eccentrics, but for
other nations to understand them better than the English do. The Germans
are better critics of the satire of Hogarth, the French of the humor of
Sterne, and the Americans of the philosophy of Shakspeare, than we to
whose country those illustrious belong. In Boston, in New York, in
Philadelphia, crowded and enthusiastic audiences would, I venture to
foretell, hang on the utterances of Robson, and expound to their own
entire satisfaction his most eloquent by-play, his subtlest gestures. It
would be idle, in the endeavor to give him something like a palpable
aspect to people who have never seen him, to compare him with other
great actors yet extant, or who have gone before. In his bursts of
passion, in his vehement soliloquies, in the soul-harrowing force of his
simulated invective, he is said to resemble Edmund Kean; but how are you
to judge of an actor who in his comic moments certainly approaches the
image we have formed to