counterfeited both deafness and lameness with a histrionic mastery which deceived even the physicians at Madeira. On his return to England he sought the protection of his uncle Moses Kean, mimic, ventriloquist, and general entertainer, who, besides continuing his pantomimic studies, introduced him to the study of Shakespeare. At the same time Miss Tidswell, an actress who had been specially kind to him from infancy, taught him the principles of acting. On the death of his uncle he was taken charge of by Miss Tidswell, and under her direction he began the systematic study of the principal Shakespearean characters, displaying even at this early period the peculiar originality of his genius by interpretations entirely different from those of Kemble. His brilliant talents and interesting countenance induced a Mrs Clarke of Guildford Street, Russell Square, to adopt him, but the unlucky remark of a visitor so touched his sensitive pride that he suddenly left her house and went back to his old surroundings. In his fourteenth year he obtained an engagement to play leading characters for twenty nights in York Theatre, appearing as Hamlet, Hastings, and Cato. Shortly afterwards, while he was in the strolling troupe of Richardson, the rumour of his abilities reached the ear of King George III, who commanded him to recite at Windsor Castle. It is affirmed that this incident led some gentlemen to send him to Eton College; but the next three years of his life, from 1803 to 1806, are without authentic record. In 1807 he played leading parts in the Belfast theatre along with Mrs Siddons, who said that he "played very very well," but that "there was too little of him to make a great actor." An engagement in 1808 to play leading characters in Beverley's provincial troupe was brought to an abrupt close by his marriage with Miss Chambers, the leading actress, and for several years after his prospects were so dark that, when contemplating the possibility of a debut in London, he was in the habit of exclaiming, "If I succeed I shall go mad." In 1814, however, the committee of Drury Lane theatre, the fortunes of which were then so low that bankruptcy seemed inevitable, resolved to give him a chance among the "experiments" they were making to win a return of popularity. His debut there on the 26th January as Shylock roused the audience to almost uncontrollable enthusiasm, and successive appearances in Richard III., Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and Lear only served to demonstrate to the fullest the greatness of his powers and his complete mastery of the whole range of tragic emotion.
Probably the irregular habits of Kean, even from the period when he became famous, were prejudicial to the refinement of his taste, and latterly they tended to exaggerate his special defects and mannerisms. The adverse decision in the divorce case Cox v. Kean, and his consequent separation from his wife, roused against him such bitter feeling as almost compelled him to retire permanently into private life. Ultimately he was received with all the old favour, but the contest by its effects both on his bodily health and on his feelings had made him so dependent on the use of stimulants that the gradual deterioration of his gifts was inevitable. Still, even in their decay his great powers triumphed during the moments of his inspiration over the absolute wreck of his physical faculties, and compelled admiration when his gait had degenerated into a weak hobble, when the lightning brilliancy of his eyes had become dull and bloodshot, and the tones of his matchless voice were marred by rough and grating hoarseness. His last appearance on the stage was at Covent Garden, on the 25th March 1833, when he played Othello to his son's Iago. At the words "Villain, be sure" in scene 3 of act iii. he suddenly broke down, and fell insensible into his son's arms. He died at Richmond, 15th May 1833.
It was especially in the impersonation of the great creations of Shakespeare's genius that the varied beauty and grandeur of the acting of Kean were displayed in their highest form, although probably his most powerful character was Sir Giles Overreach, the effect of his first impersonation of which was such that the pit rose en masse, and even the actors and actresses themselves were overcome by the terrific dramatic illusion. His only personal disadvantage as an actor was his small stature. His countenance was strikingly interesting and unusually mobile; he had a matchless command of facial elocution; his fine eyes scintillated even the slightest shades of emotion and thought; his voice, though weak and harsh in the upper register, possessed in its lower range tones of penetrating and resistless power, and a thrilling sweetness like the witchery of the finest music; above all, in the grander moments of his passion, his intellect and soul seemed to rise beyond material barriers and to glorify physical defects with their own greatness. Kean specially excelled as the exponent of passion. In Othello, Iago, Shylock, and Richard III., characters utterly different from each other, but in which the predominant element is some form of passion, his identification with the personality, as he had conceived it, was as nearly as possible perfect, and each isolated phase and aspect of the plot was elaborated with the minutest attention to details, and yet with an absolute subordination of these to the distinct individuality he was endeavouring to portray. If the range of character in which Kean attained supreme excellence was narrow, no one except Garrick has been so successful in so many great impersonations. Unlike Garrick, he had no true talent for comedy, but in the expression of biting and saturnine wit, of grim and ghostly gaiety, he was unsurpassed.
See Procter's Life of Kean, but especially the Life of Edmund Kean, by F. W. Hawkins, 2 vols., 1869, and the authorities therein mentioned. Some interesting details will also be found in Edward Stirling's Old Drury Lane, 1881.
KEATS, JOHN, born October 29, 1795, published his first volume of verse in 1817, his second in the following year, his third in 1820, and died of consumption at Rome, February 23, 1821, in the fourth month of his twenty-sixth year. In his first book there was little foretaste of anything greatly or even genuinely good; but between the marshy and sandy flats of sterile or futile verse there were undoubtedly some few purple patches of floral promise. The style was frequently detestable—a mixture of sham Spenserian and mock Wordsworthian, alternately florid and arid. His second book, Endymion, rises in its best passages to the highest level of Barnfield and of Lodge, the two previous poets with whom, had he published nothing more, he might most properly have been classed; and this, among minor minstrels, is no unenviable place. His third book raised him at once to a foremost rank in the highest class of English poets. Never was any one of them but Shelley so little of a marvellous boy and so suddenly revealed as a marvellous man. Never has any poet suffered so much from the chaotic misarrangement of his poems in every collected edition. The rawest and the rankest rubbish of his fitful spring is bound up in one sheaf with the ripest ears, flung into one basket with the richest fruits, of his sudden and splendid summer. The Ode to a Nightingale, one of the final masterpieces of human work in all time and for all ages, is immediately preceded in all editions now current by some of the most vulgar and fulsome doggrel ever whimpered by a vapid and effeminate rhymester in the sickly stage of whelphood. Shelley, up to twenty, had written little or nothing that would have done credit to a boy of ten; and of Keats also it may be said that the merit of his work at twenty-five was hardly by comparison more wonderful than its demerit at twenty-two. His first book fell as flat as it deserved to fall; the reception of his second, though less considerate than on the whole it deserved, was not more contemptuous than that of immeasurably better books published about the same time by Coleridge, Landor, and Shelley. A critic of exceptional carefulness and candour might have noted in the first book so singular an example of a stork among the cranes as the famous and noble sonnet on Chapman's Homer; a just judge would have indicated, a partial advocate might have exaggerated, the value of such golden grain amid a garish harvest of tares as the hymn to Pan and the translation
