was achieved, poured a bowl of punch over the stage-manager's head at Drury Lane, to punish his impertinent criticisms at the first rehearsal. The same proud independence led him to avoid the social honors of rank. He liked professional and literary men because he thought they truly relished and understood his art. The restraints, the cold uniformity, and the absence of vivid interest in the circles of the nobility, either oppressed or irritated him, and he chafed until free to give vent to his humor, passion, and convivial tastes among boon companions.
A fine audacity and that abhorrence of the conventional we find in hunters, poets, and artists—the instinctive self-assertion of a nature assured that its own resources are its best and only reliable means of success and enjoyment—thus underlaid Kean's wayward and extravagant moods; and while it essentially interfered with his popularity as a man, it was a primary cause of his triumph as an actor; for no histrionic genius more clearly owed his success to the will. In this regard he was a species of Alfieri. The style he adopted, the method he pursued, and the aim he cherished, were neither understood nor encouraged until their own intrinsic and overwhelming superiority won both the critics and the multitude. The taste in England had been formed by Kemble and his school: dignity, correctness, grave emphasis, and highly-finished elocution had become the standard characteristics. Kean was a bold innovator upon this system; he trusted to nature more than to art, or rather endeavored to fuse the two. Thus, while carefully giving the very shades of meaning to the words of Shakspeare, he endeavored to personify the character—not according to an eloquent ideal, but with human reality, as if the very life-blood of Othello and Lear, their temperaments as well as their experience, had been vitally transferred to his frame and brain. He seemed possessed with the character he represented; and, throwing mere technical rules to the winds, identified himself through passional sympathy, regulated by studious comtemplation, with the idiosyncrasies of those whose very natures and being be aspired to embody and develop.
Kean obeyed the instinct of genius, when, in opposition to the management at Drury Lane, arranging his débût, he exclaimed,
