and made his audience thrill with the fierce energy of his soul. But while it thus subserved the purposes of art, and was, in fact, an element of his genius, it infected his private life with a reckless and half-maniacal extravagance that was fostered by his addiction to stimulants, an unprotected infancy, and the precarious and baffled tenor of his youth and early manhood.
When we bring home to ourselves this erratic behavior, combined with extreme vicissitudes of fortune, the career of Kean, as a man, seems almost as remarkable as it was as an actor. A stage-Cupid at two years of age, a circus-rider and harlequin, then an infant prodigy reciting Rolla; his very origin disputed; now the slave of a capricious, ignorant, and selfish woman; and now the wayward protege of a benevolent lady; arranging Mother Goose for one manager, and taking the part of a supernumerary for another; reduced to such poverty as to travel on foot, his wife trudging wearily at his side, and his boy clinging to his back; at one time swimming a river with his theatrical wardrobe in a bundle held by the teeth, and, at another, for whole days, half-famished, and his wife praying at her lonely vigils for a speedy release by death from hopeless suffering; to-day dancing attendance, for the hundredth time, at Drury Lane, to gain the ear of the director, and known among the bystanders only as "the little man with the capes;" and to-morrow, the idol of the town, his dressing-room besieged by lords—few chronicles in real life display more vivid and sudden contrasts than the life of Kean. The mercurial temper that belonged to him was liable, at any moment, to be excited by drink, sympathy, an idea, or an incident. One night it induced him to disturb the quiet household where he lodged, by jumping through a glass door; another, to seize the heads of the leaders attached to his majesty's mail-coach and attempt a wrestling-match. In Dublin, it winged his flight for hours through the dusky streets, with a mob of screaming constables at his heels. It inspired him to engage in midnight races on horseback. In more quiet manifestations, it induced him to make a pet of a lion, and a sacred relic of the finger-bone of Cook; and prompted him, to his wife's extreme annoyance, to retire to bed in the costume of a monkey. At one time it led him to muse for hours in a church-yard; and, at another,
