little scope to the actor to exhibit his powers in exciting either feeling or amusement; and the circumstances under which he moves, and the incidents in which he is engaged, are so much out of the ordinary course of human affairs at this day, or indeed at any time, that we know of, and so defaced by improbability even beyond the utmost sketch of poetical license allowable to dramatists, that the character lies a dead weight upon the performer.The same may be said of all the others, Alfonso excepted, which is drawn with such strong and masterly tints, of the genuine old comic humour and eccentricity, that he alone presents the only congruity between character, plot and incident that appears in the whole, and is so far diverting. He could not be placed in better hands to help him forward than in those of Warren.

Of the motley groupe which made up the rest of the medley there is nothing to be said worth the saying-Of the madmen particularly, it would be little short of a libel upon the actors, if we were to say that they well represented characters which are so very disgusting in both the conception and execution, that every mind imbued with a tincture of refined taste and every heart not hardened against the feelings of humanity, and dead to honest pride in his species, must revolt from them. But, as we said before, morë of this hereafter.

MACBETH.Of the merits of Mr. Cooper in Macbeth, we have more than once recorded our sentiments, and as we have written, so we have spoken with no niggard praise of his performance of several important parts of that most arduous character. If lavish commendation had always the effect of stimulating genius to improvement, and animating industry to judicious exertion, Mr. Cooper would at this time stand as high in the opinion of sober criticism, as he does in the eyes of his admirers, in many characters, and particularly in Macbeth, which we once considered as more than any other, the character in which he manifested greatest histrionic capacity. When we assert that the reverse is the case with this gentleman, we are aware that our words may be misinterpreted, and therefore will anticipate misconception by a precise and unequivocal explanation of our meaning. When we speak of judicious exertion, we are far from meaning corporal effort, or elaborated action: we mean that intellectual effort, that studious dissection of the character into its component parts, and that subtile scrutiny into the meaning of every atom of it,

which enables an actor to inhale, as it were, the spirit of his author and to intermingle it with his own, or at least so intimately to adopt the poet's ideas, that though he may not positively feel, he should so far imitate the passion intended to be described as to excite correspondent emotions in the audience. This, which constitutes the chief glory of the truly great actor, can never be accomplished, if the eye of the auditor is made to anticipate his ear, and the obviously studied action of the player visibly precedes his utterance; when the feelings, instead of coming at the summons of nature, wait for the intervention of the actor's will, and the mechanical movement of the body supersedes the workings of the soul. The great actor is ever to his character what (in horticulture) the stock is to the scion. He takes the matter, though foreign, to the most perfect vital adoption, and from his more coarse tap-root supplies juices, not to change the nature of, but to enlarge the fruit.

Now it is evident that this can never be done if the actor be not so very perfect in the words, that they will fall from his tongue, glibly, spontaneously, without the intervention of reflection, or the immediate laboured exercise of the memory. Before ever he comes on the stage, the words of the character should be not only so ingrafted in his memory, but habituated to his tongue, that he would utter them with precision, even while his thoughts were engaged on other matter. He should be as immoveably master of his part, as thorough bred horsemen are of their saddles, many of whom will keep their seats firmly, even when, if placed on their legs, they would be incapable of standing;-and to the words, the action should be as instantaneously relative and correspondent, as they are found in the ordinary actions of life, which are so certain and independent of the will or reflection, that they are done unconsciously, and are often therefore ascribed to instinct.*

An incorrectness in his part which greatly defaces his performance,and would mar any poetry, has ever been, at least since we knew him, the leading fault of Mr. Cooper: as it is one which requires only

*If in a large company, one makes mention of an accident that befel his nose, or a pain in his jaw, instantly every other applies his hand to his own nose or chin, or if one speaks of wanting to shave, the person to whom he speaks immediately rubs his chin.

such common exertion as lies in any actor's power, it was not unreasonable to hope that regard to his own fame as well as respect for the public, by whom he is so much and justly admired and favoured, would have suggested to him the expediency of reforming it: it mortifies us however, to say that he has grown rather worse, than better. The words and refined sense of his author, and along with them his own genius, he often leaves to shift for themselves; bending his whole mind to the production of practical stage effect. Instead of charging his memory with the words, exercising his sagacity in unfolding their latent meaning, and forming nice and natural discriminations, he seems to be taxing his invention for new modes of producing stage effect, while incorrect emphasis, spurious new readings, and false and inapplicable picturesque are accumulated, till the poet, his meaning and his character are eclipsed by an impervious mass of flashy redundance.

Though we take occasion to mention this under the head of Macbeth, we state it as applicable to Mr. Cooper, in many other characters. Of his negligence respecting the words, we speak with certainty in Shakspeare's characters, which we have read so often as to be able to detect the lapses. Of some others too we can say the same, for we have felt that pain which without knowing the text, any one who has a moderately good ear must feel, at hearing the mellifluous flow of the verse rippled and broken, by the substitution of words of unequal number, for the true ones. If Mr. Cooper's faults were those of nature, and the feebleness of his organic powers obstructed the efforts of his intellectual, however we might deplore, we would not censure, but say of him as the giant satirist Churchill, in his Rosciad, says of old Mr. Sheridan,

When he falls short, 'tis Nature's fault alone,
When he succeeds, the merit's all his own.

But when on the contrary nature has been profuse in her gifts, and her bounty is returned with negligence, or to invert the idea of the critical poet,

When most that's great is nature's gift alone,

And every error is the actor's own;

the critic who praises without an ample qualification of censure, in effect falsifies, deserts his duty, deceives the public, and justly merits, himself, the reproach that he withholds.

With what face could we utter the language of panegyric upon Mr. Cooper's dagger scene, and the other excellent parts of his Macbeth, for which we are bound and happy to praise him, if we smuggled into concealment the faults which counterbalance them. Of defects to which the capabilities he displays in other respects would seem to give the complexion of wilfulness, spectators must be wholly intolerant, if they were not expiated by beauties, which to the eyes of the many are more striking and conspicuous; but sober criticism, which always expects from an actor just so much as his capacity enables him to give, and no more, considers those beauties, not as palliatives, but on the contrary as aggravations of the interposing faults, since they show what the actor could doCould, but would not. In the alternations of fault and excellence, which run through Mr. Cooper's acting, and in succession elevate us to hope and sink us in disappointment, we cannot help asking ourselves what the cause of such vast inequality can be. In every human performance, that includes an extent and variety of thought and action, we know that there must necessarily be some inequality. Garrick himself, played some parts of Macbeth, of Hamlet, and of Richard better than others: but we never remember to have seen or heard of an actor who was in different scenes of the same character, extremely great and extremely defective. Nor would Garrick himself ever have passed current, much less obtained high renown, if he had repeatedly ventured on the stage, imperfect in his part. So convinced, on the contrary, was that extraordinary personage, of the necessity of diligent attention to that point, so lively was his sense of the respect due to his audience, and of the claims of his own honourable fame, that his study of every character he performed continued unremitted to the last moments of his theatrical life. Not content with the applause of the multitude, nor even with the filling of his darling coffers, he was so determined to disarm criticism, and bid defiance to the most fastidious cavillers, and vigilant inspectors, that after having repeatedly, every season for thirty years, acted Lear, Macbeth, &c. he would not venture to perform them again without devoting some previous days to the restudying and private rehearsal of them; so that his worst enemies might, for aught he cared, have held the books in their hands, and traced him, syllable by syllable, through the part, while he was performing it. The same may be said of the Garrick of the western

hemisphere, Hodgkinson. When Mr. Cooper has it in his power by only a little industry,—(industry applied to its legitimate object we mean,) to bid defiance to critics and cavillers also, why does he not do so?

We expect from Mr. Cooper nothing unreasonable-nothing of which he is incapable-Nothing that will not redound to his own fame and advantage; we ask of him only to be as great as he may be. To depend more upon nature and genius, and less upon mechanical effort and art.-To consult his author, and his own mind more, and to labour his limbs and body less. To remember that every good poem is a picture, (ut pictura erit poesis,) that above all others a dramatic poem," or play is a picture,—a picture of man's nature which the actor, who is employed to personate it, is bound to make as like the original as possible, and that the most consummate artists have been so intent upon this that, not content with taking man, as he appears embarrassed and adulterated with his artificial associated habits, they have gone to the fountain head of nature, to infancy itself, for their lineaments: so did Raphael, and all the masters of the Italian school-so did Reynolds, who to that end made children the constant objects of his study, observing and treasuring up their looks and attitudes,* which being unembarrassed and unperverted by assumed factitious manners, he justly considered as more characteristical of the species, than the actions of men and women; and this it was that supplied him with so many exquisite figures. We wish Mr. Cooper to remember, that this simple imitation of nature, so expedient in all cases, is indispensably necessary to accomplish the personification of true dignity and sublimity of character, and that to their practice of that, the Italian school owes its vast superiority over the Dutch and its imitators: if he will take the pains to examine the works of those two schools, he will find that that which in the Kemble acting passes for picturesque never found its way into the former. The figures of tragedy and comedy in Reynolds' famous picture where they are struggling for Garrick, are, the former much more grand, and the latter infinitely more winning, because more simple and natural than all the attitudes of Mr. Kemble and his disciples put together, if their gracefulness could be collected and amalgamated in one figure.

See Beattie's Essay on Poetry and Music.