s to say in what line of character he has excelled the most. The
Titanic grandeur of Lear, the human debasement of Werner, the frank
vivacity of Henry V, the gloomy and timorous guilt of King John, or
that--his last--personation of Macbeth, in which it seemed to me that he
conveyed a more correct notion of what Shakespeare designed than I can
recollect to have read in the most profound of the German critics; for I
take it, what Shakespeare meant to represent in Macbeth was the kind of
character which is most liable to be influenced by a belief in
supernatural agencies--a man who is acutely sensitive to all
impressions, who has a restless imagination more powerful than his will,
who sees daggers in the air and ghosts in the banquet-hall, who has
moral weakness and physical courage, and who--as our guest represented
him--alternates perpetually between terror and daring--a trembler when
oppressed by his conscience, and a warrior when defied by his foe. But
in this and in all that numberless crowd of characters which is too
fresh in your memories for me to enumerate, we don't so much say "How
well this was spoken," or "How finely that was acted," but we feel
within ourselves how true was the personation of the whole.

Gentlemen, there is a word that is often applied to artists and to
authors, and I think we always apply it improperly when we speak of a
superior intellect--I mean the word "versatile." Now, I think the proper
word is "comprehensive." The man of genius does not vary and change,
which is the meaning of the word versatile, but he has a mind
sufficiently expanded to comprehend variety and change. If I can succeed
in describing the circle, I can draw as many lines as I please from the
centre straight to the circumference, but it must be upon the
condition--for that is the mathematical law--that all these lines shall
be equal, one to the other, or it is not a circle that I describe. Now,
I do not say our guest is versatile; I say that he is comprehensive; and
the proof that he has mastered the most perfect form of the
comprehensive faculty is this--that all the lines he has created within
the range of his art are equal the one to the other. And this,
gentlemen, explains to us that originality which even his detractors
have conceded to him.

Every great actor has his manner as every great writer has his style.
But the originality of our guest does not consist in his manner alone,
but in his singular depth of though