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CHARLES FECHTER
holding the lease of the Lyceum Thea-
tre from 1862 to 1867. He was sped on
his transatlantic way by the praise of most
of the critical journals of the great me-
tropolis, and by the warm eulogium of his
friend Charles Dickens. His complete
abandonment of England for this country
tends to prove that he had outworn the best
of his favor in the British Isles.
In New York Fechter's interpretation
of Hamlet was greeted with a chorus of
disapproval, broken by emphatic praise
from several high sources, and his innova-
tions upon received traditions as to the
outer particulars of the performance were
the subject of much disparagement. The
public, however, were keenly interested
in all his work, especially in his assump-
tions of Ruy Bias, Claude Melnotte, and
other romantic characters. I thought, and
think, that most of the vexed questions of
detail alluded to were matters of leather
and prunello. Fechter's reasoning — de-
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