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A DRAMATIC CRITIC
business." My memory holds an un-
dimmed picture of Edwin Booth as I first
saw him at the Boston Theatre, in Shake-
spearean parts, during the season of
1856-57, when he was twenty-three years
of age, — beautiful exceedingly in face and
form, crude with the promise-crammed
crudity of youthful genius, and already
showing, with short intermissions and ob-
scurations, the blaze of the divine fire.
From that point I followed him, I may
say, through his histrionic course until
its close, as hundreds of my readers fol-
lowed him. We saw, with an interest and
curiosity always keen and a satisfaction
seldom marred, his gradual growth in re-
finement and scholarship, the steady deep-
ening and enriching of his docile and
intuitive spirit, the swift experimental
play of his keen intellect, and the broad
development of that style in which the
academic and the vital were so finely
fused.
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