be immediately chased away by the wild torments of insanity — I declare I never could see that expression that the tears did not rain down my face.
And yet, like his fellow-genius General Grant, who at that same moment was playing his role so extremely well on a distant battle-field, he was no talker and no orator; he could not, or he would not, talk about his parts or about Shakespeare.
He said of his Othello that it was only a sketch, and he rather laughed at its being a good one. He liked later on to be praised for his Hamlet and his Cardinal "Wolsey and his Petruchio; he said he was satisfied with those impersonations.
He failed utterly as Romeo; and when his theatre burned down and he was temporarily ruined, of all his wardrobe nothing was left but one shoe of Romeo's, "left for me to kick myself with," he said.
I never met him after those days of his youth and beauty in society. He became more famous, and was always much liked and respected; but I am glad to keep apart my little vision of him at this period when he was a dream, the realization of what Shakespeare might have seen with his mind's eye. He was an exquisitely refined person, and had an air of sadness and preoccupation even then. The sadness of those days, the misery which the assassination of Lincoln brought upon us all, my own private grief at the time, induce me to skip much that would be historical. It has, however, had the advantage of a thousand pens — that dreadful epoch during and just after the war.
I must notice one little book. I dare say the gifted author has forgotten that he ever wrote it.
It was Whitelaw Reid's account of a Tour in the South with Chief-Justice Chase in 1866. The learned
