ROBSON.

In the whole of London there is not a dirtier, narrower, and more

disreputable thoroughfare than Wych Street. It runs from that lowest

part of Drury Lane where Nell Gwyn once had her lodgings, and stood at

her door in very primitive costume to see the milkmaids go a-Maying, and

parallel to Holywell Street and the Strand, into the church-yard of St.

Clements Danes. No good, it was long supposed, could ever come out of

Wych Street. The place had borne an evil name for centuries. Up a

horrible little court branching northward from it good old George

Cruikshank once showed me the house where Jack Sheppard, the robber and

prison-breaker, served his apprenticeship to Mr. Wood, the carpenter;

and on a beam in the loft of this house Jack is said to have carved his

name. When the pavement of the Strand is under repair, Wych Street

becomes, perforce, the principal channel of communication between the

east and the west end; and Theodore Hook used to say that he never

passed through Wych Street in a hackney-coach without being blocked up

by a hearse and a coal-wagon in the van, and a mud-cart and the Lord

Mayor's carriage in the rear. Wych Street is among the highways we

English are ashamed to show to foreigners. We have threatened to pull it

down bodily, any time these two hundred years, and a portion of the

southern side, on which the old Lyons Inn abutted, has indeed been

razed, preparatory to the erection of a grand metropolitan hotel on the

American system; but the funds appear not to be forthcoming; the scheme

languishes; and, on the other side of the street, another legal

hostelry, New Inn, still flourishes in weedy dampness, immovable in the

strength of vested interests. Many more years must, I am afraid, elapse

before we get rid of Wych Street. It is full of quaint old Tudor houses,

with tall gables, carved porches, and lattice-casements; but the

picturesque appearance of these tenements compensates but ill for their

being mainly dens of vice and depravity, inhabited by the vilest

offscourings of the enormous city. Next to _Napoli senza sole_, Wych

Street, Drury Lane, is, morally and physically, about the shadiest

street I know.

In Wych Street stands, nevertheless, an oasis in the midst of a desert,

a pretty and commodious little theatre, called the Olympic. The

entertainments here provided have earned, for brilliance and elegance,

so well-deserved a repute, that the Olympic Theatre has become one of

the most favorite resorts of the British aristocracy. The Brahminical

classes appear oblivious of the yellow streak of caste, when they come

hither. On four or five nights in every week during the season, Drury

Lane is rendered well-nigh impassable by splendid equipages which have

conveyed dukes and marquises and members of Parliament to the Olympic.

Frequently, but prior to the lamented death of Prince Albert, you might

observe, if you passed through Wych Street in the forenoon, a little

platform, covered with faded red cloth, and shaded by a dingy, striped

awning, extending from one of the entrance-doors of the Olympic to the

edge of the sidewalk. The initiated became at once aware that Her Most

Gracious Majesty intended to visit the Olympic Theatre that very

evening. The Queen of England goes to theatres no more; but the Prince

of Wales and his pretty young wife, the stout, good-tempered Duke of

Cambridge, and his sister, the bonny Princess Mary, are still constant

visitors to Wych Street. So gorgeous is often the assemblage in this

murkiest of streets, that you are reminded of the days when the French

_noblesse_, in all the pride of hoops and hair-powder, deigned to flock

to the lowly wine-shop of Ramponneau.

My business, however, is less with the Olympic Theatre, as it at present

exists, than with its immediate predecessor. About fifteen years ago,

there stood in Wych Street a queer, low-browed little building with a

rough wooden portico before it,--not unlike such a portico as I have

recently seen in front of a dilapidated inn at Culpepper, Virginia,--and

with little blinking windows, very much resembling the port-holes of a

man-of-war. According to tradition, the place had, indeed, a kind of

naval origin. Old King George III., who, when he was not mad, or

meddling with politics, was really a good-natured kind of man, once made

Philip Astley, the riding-master, and proprietor of the circus in South

Lambeth, a present of a dismantled seventy-four gun-ship captured from

the French. With these timbers, some lath and plaster, a few bricks, and

a little money, Astley ran up a theatre dedicated to the performance of

interludes and _burlettas_,--that is, of pieces in which the dialogue

was not spoken, but sung, in order to avoid interference with the

patent-rights of Drury Lane and Covent Garden. In our days, this edifice

was known as the Olympic. When I knew this theatre first, it had fallen

into a state of seemingly hopeless decadence. Nobody succeeded there. To

lease the Olympic Theatre was to court bankruptcy and invite collapse.

The charming Vestris had been its tenant for a while. There Liston and

Wrench had delighted the town with their most excellent fooling. There

many of Planche's most sparkling burlesques had been produced. There a

perfect boudoir of a green-room had been fitted up by Bartolozzi's

beautiful and witty daughter; and there Hook and Jerrold, Haynes Bayley

and A' Beckett had uttered their wittiest sayings. But the destiny of

the Olympic was indomitable. There was nae luck about the house; and

Eliza Vestris went bankrupt at last. Management after management tried

its fortunes in the doomed little house, but without success. Desperate

adventurers seized upon it as a last resource, or chose it as a place

wherein to consummate their ruin. The Olympic was contiguous to the

Insolvent Debtors' Court, in Portugal Street, and from the paint-pots of

the Olympic scene-room to the whitewash of the commercial tribunal there

was but one step.

It must have been in 1848 that the famous comedian, William Farren,

having realized a handsome fortune as an actor, essayed to lose a

considerable portion of his wealth by becoming a manager. He succeeded

in the last-named enterprise quite as completely as he had done in the

other: I mean, that he lost a large sum of money in the Olympic Theatre.

He played all kinds of pieces: among others, he gave the public two very

humorous burlesques, founded on Shakspeare's plays of "Macbeth" and "The

Merchant of Venice." The authors were two clever young Oxford men: Frank

Talfourd, the son of the poet-Judge,--father and son are, alas! both

dead,--and William Hale, the son of the well-known Archdeacon and Master

of the Charter-House. Shakspearian burlesques were no novelty to the

town. We had had enough and to spare of them. W. J. Hammond, the

original _Sam Weller_ in the dramatized version of "Pickwick," had made

people laugh in "Macbeth Travestie" and "Othello according to Act of

Parliament." The Olympic burlesques were slightly funnier, and not

nearly so coarse as their forerunners; but they were still of no

striking salience. Poorly mounted, feebly played,--save in one

particular,--they drew but thin houses. Gradually, however, you began to

hear at clubs and in critical coteries--at the Albion and the Garrick

and the Café de l'Europe, at Evans's and at Kilpack's, at the Réunion in

Maiden Lane and at Rules's oyster-room, where poor Albert Smith used to

reign supreme--rumors about a new actor. The new man was playing

_Macbeth_ and _Shylock_ in Talfourd and Hale's parodies. He was a little

stunted fellow, not very well-favored, not very young. Nobody--among the

bodies who were anybody--had ever heard of him before. Whence he came,

or what he was, none knew; but everybody came at last to care. For this

little stunted creature, with his hoarse voice and nervous gestures and

grotesque delivery, his snarls, his leers, his hunchings of the

shoulders, his contortions of the limbs, his gleaming of the eyes, and

his grindings of the teeth, was a genius. He became town-talk. He

speedily grew famous. He has been an English, I might almost say a

European, I might almost say a worldwide celebrity ever since; and his

name was FREDERICK ROBSON.

Eventually it was known, when the town grew inquisitive, and the critics

were compelled to ferret out his antecedents, that the new actor had

already attained middle age,--that he had been vegetating for years in

that obscurest and most miserable of all dramatic positions, the low

comedian of a country-theatre,--that he had come timidly to London and

accepted at a low salary the post of buffoon at a half-theatre

half-saloon in the City Road, called indifferently the "Grecian" and the

"Eagle," where he had danced and tumbled, and sung comic songs, and

delivered the dismal waggeries set down for him, without any marked

success, and almost without notice. He was a quiet, unassuming little

man, this Robson, seemingly without vanity and without ambition. He had

a wife and family to maintain, and drew his twenty-five or thirty

shillings weekly with perfect patience and resignation.

A weary period, however, elapsed between his appearance at the Olympic

and his realization of financial success. The critics and the

connoisseurs talked about him a long time before the public could be

persuaded to go and see him, or the manager to raise his salary. That

doomed house with the wooden portico was in the way. At last the

wretched remnant of the French seventy-four caught fire and was burned

to the ground. Its ill-luck was consistent to the last. A poor actor,

named Bender, had engaged the Olympic for a benefit. He was to pay

twenty pounds for the use of the house. He had just sold nineteen

pounds' worth of tickets, and trusted to the casual receipts at the door

for his profits. At a few minutes before six o'clock, having to play in

the first piece, he proceeded to the theatre, and entered his

dressing-room. By half-past six the whole house was in a blaze. Bender,

half undressed, had only time to save himself; and his coat, with the

nineteen pounds in the pocket, fell a prey to the flames. After this,

will you tell me that there is not such a thing as ill-luck?

The Olympic arose "like a phoenix from its ashes." To use language

less poetical, a wealthy tradesman--a cheesemonger, I think--found the

capital to build up a new theatre. The second edifice was elegant, and

almost splendid; but in the commencement it seemed fated to undergo as

evil fortune as its precursor. I cannot exactly remember whether it was

in the old or the new Olympic--but I think it was in the new one--that

the notorious Walter Watts ran a brief and sumptuous career as manager.

He produced many pieces, some of them his own, in a most luxurious

manner. He was a man about town, a _viveur_, a dandy; and it turned out

one morning that Walter Watts had been, all along, a clerk in the Globe

Insurance Office, at a salary of a hundred and fifty pounds a year; and

that he had swindled his employers out of enormous sums of money. He was

tried, nominally for stealing "a piece of paper, value one penny," being

a check which he had abstracted; but it was understood that his

defalcations were little short of ninety thousand pounds sterling. Watts

was convicted, and sentenced to ten years' transportation. The poor

wretch was not of the heroically villanous mould in which the dashing

criminals who came after him, Robson and Redpath, were cast. He was

troubled with a conscience. He had drunk himself into delirium tremens;

and starting from his pallet one night in a remorseful frenzy, he hanged

himself in the jail.

It was during the management of Alfred Wigan at the New Olympic that

Frederick Robson began to be heard of again. An old, and not a very

clever farce, by one of the Brothers Mayhew, entitled "The Wandering

Minstrel," had been revived. In this farce, Robson was engaged to play

the part of _Jem Baggs_, an itinerant vocalist and flageolet-player,

who, in tattered attire, roams about from town to town, making the air

hideous with his performances. The part was a paltry one, and Robson,

who had been engaged mainly at the instance of the manager's wife, a

very shrewd and appreciative lady, who persisted in declaring that the

ex-low-comedian of the Grecian had "something in him," eked it out by

singing an absurd ditty called "Vilikins and his Dinah." The words and

the air of "Vilikins" were, if not literally as old as the hills,

considerably older than the age of Queen Elizabeth. The story told in

the ballad, of a father's cruelty, a daughter's anguish, a sweetheart's

despair, and the ultimate suicide of both the lovers, is, albeit couched

in uncouth and grotesque language, as pathetic as the tragedy of "Romeo

and Juliet." Robson gave every stanza a nonsensical refrain of "Right

tooral lol looral, right tooral lol lay." At times, when his audience

was convulsed with merriment, he would come to a halt, and gravely

observe, "This is not a comic song"; but London, was soon unanimous that

such exquisite comicality had not been heard for many a long year.

"Vilikins and his Dinah" created a _furore_. My countrymen are always

going mad about something; and Englishmen and Englishwomen all agreed to

go crazy about "Vilikins." "Right tooral lol looral" was on every lip.

Robson's portrait as _Jem Baggs_ was in every shop-window. A newspaper

began an editorial with the first line in "Vilikins,"--

"It's of a liquor-merchant who in London did dwell."

A Judge of Assize absolutely fined the High Sheriff of a county one

hundred pounds for the mingled contempt shown in neglecting to provide

him with an escort of javelin-men and introducing the irrepressible

"Right tooral lol looral" into a speech delivered at the opening of

circuit. Nor was the song all that was wonderful in _Jem Baggs_. His

"make-up" was superb. The comic genius of Robson asserted itself in an

inimitable lagging gait, an unequalled snivel, a coat and pantaloons

every patch on and every rent in which were artistic, and a hat

inconceivably battered, crunched, and bulged out of normal, and into

preternatural shape.

New triumphs awaited him. In the burlesque of "The Yellow Dwarf," he

showed a mastery of the grotesque which approached the terrible. Years

before, in _Macbeth_, he had personated a red-headed, fire-eating,

whiskey-drinking Scotchman,--and in _Shylock_, a servile, fawning,

obsequious, yet, when emergency arose, a passionate and vindictive Jew.

In the _Yellow Dwarf_ he was the jaundiced embodiment of a spirit of

Oriental evil: crafty, malevolent, greedy, insatiate,--full of mockery,

mimicry, lubricity, and spite,--an Afrit, a Djinn, a Ghoul, a spawn of

Sheitan. How that monstrous orange-tawny head grinned and wagged! How

those flaps of ears were projected forwards, like unto those of a dog!

How balefully those atrabilious eyes glistened! You laughed, and yet you

shuddered. He spoke in mere doggerel and slang. He sang trumpery songs

to negro melodies. He danced the Lancashire clog-hornpipe; he rattled

out puns and conundrums; yet did he contrive to infuse into all this

mummery and buffoonery, into this salmagundi of the incongruous and the

_outré_, an unmistakably tragic element,--an element of depth and

strength and passion, and almost of sublimity. The mountebank became

inspired. The Jack Pudding suddenly drew the _cothurnus_ over his clogs.

You were awe-stricken by the intensity, the vehemence, he threw into the

mean balderdash of the burlesque-monger. These qualities were even more

apparent in his subsequent personation of _Medea_, in Robert Brough's

parody of the Franco-Italian tragedy. The love, the hate, the scorn, of

the abandoned wife of _Jason_, the diabolic loathing in which she holds

_Creüsa_, the tigerish affection with which she regards the children

whom she is afterwards to slay,--all these were portrayed by Robson,

through the medium, be it always remembered, of doggerel and slang, with

astonishing force and vigor. The original _Medea_, the great Ristori

herself, came to see Robson, and was delighted with and amazed at him.

She scarcely understood two words of English, but the actor's genius

struck her home through the bull's-hide target of an unknown tongue.

_"Uomo straordinario!"_ she went away saying.

I have anticipated the order of his successes, but at this distance of

time and places I can keep no chronological count of them. Robson has

always alternated the serio-comic burlesque with pure farce, and after

_Jem Baggs_ his brightest hits have been in the deaf ostler in "Boots at

the Swan" and the discharged criminal in "Retained for the Defence." In

the burlesque of "Masaniello," he had an opportunity--which some thought

would prove a magnificent one to him--of showing the grotesque side of

insanity; but, for some reason or other, the part seemed distasteful to

him. It may have been repugnant to his eminently sensitive spirit to

exhibit the ludicrous aspect of the most dreadful of human infirmities.

_A peste, fame, bello, et dementia libera nos, Domine!_ Perhaps the

piece itself was weak. At all events, "Masaniello" had but a brief run.

A drunken man, a jealous man, a deaf man, a fool, a vagabond, a demon, a

tyrant, Robson could marvellously depict: in the crazy Neapolitan

fisherman he either failed or was unwilling to excel. I had been for a

long period extremely solicitous to see Robson undertake the part of

_Sir Giles Overreach_ in "A New Way to pay Old Debts." You know that

_Sir Giles_, after the discovery of the obliterated deed, goes stark

staring mad. I should have wished to see him assume Edmund Kean's own

character in the real play itself; but Robson was nervous of venturing

on a purely "legitimate" _rôle_. I was half persuaded to write a

burlesque on "A New Way to pay Old Debts," and Robson had promised to do

his very best with _Sir Giles_; but a feeling, half of laziness, and

half of reverence for the fine old drama, came over me, and I never got

farther than the first scene.

By this time some of the foremost dramatists in London thought they

could discern in Robson latent characteristics of a nature far more

elevated than those which his previous performances had brought into

play. It was decided by those who had a right to render an authoritative

verdict, that he would shine best in that which we call the "domestic

drama." Here it was thought his broad fun, rustic waggery, and curious

mastery of provincial dialect might admirably contrast with the

melodramatic intensity, and the homely, but touching pathos of which in

so eminent a degree he was the master. Hence the dramas, written

expressly and deliberately to his measure and capacity, of "Daddy

Hardacre," "The Porter's Knot," and "The Chimney-Corner." When I say

written, I mean, of course, translated. Our foremost dramatists have not

yet ceased to borrow from the French; but, like the gypsies, they so

skilfully mutilate the children they have stolen, that the theft becomes

almost impossible to detect. Not one person in five hundred, for

instance, would discover at first sight that a play so apparently

English in conception and structure as the "Ticket-of-Leave Man" is, in

reality, a translation from the French.

The success achieved by Robson in the dramas I have named was extended,

and was genuine. In _Daddy Hardacre_, a skilful adaptation of the usurer

in Balzac's "Eugénie Grandet," he was tremendous. It made me more than

ever wishful to see him in the griping, ruthless _Overreach_, foiled at

last in his wicked ambition and driven to frenzy by the destruction of

the document by which he thought to satisfy his lust of gain. Molière's

_Avare_ I thought he would have acted wonderfully; Ben Jonson's

_Volpone_, in "The Fox," he would surely have understood, and powerfully

rendered. In the devoted father of "The Porter's Knot" he was likewise

most excellent: quiet, unaffected, unobtrusive, never forcing sentiment

upon you, never obtaining tears by false pretences, but throughout

solid, sterling, natural, admirable. I came at last, however, to the

conviction, that, marked as was the distinction gained by this good

actor in parts such as these, and as the lighthouse-keeper--the

character originally sustained in private by Charles Dickens--in Wilkie

Collins's play, domestic drama was not his _forte_; or, rather, that it

was not his _fortissimo_. In fantastic burlesque, in the comic-terrible,

he was unrivalled and inimitable. In the domestic drama he could hardly

be surpassed, but he might be approached. Webster, Emery, Addison, could

play _Daddy Hardacre_, or the father in "The Porter's Knot"; but none

but himself could at once awe and convulse in _Medea_ and _the Yellow

Dwarf_. These domestic dramas interested, however, as much by their

subject as by the excellence of his acting. Moreover, the public are apt

sometimes to grow weary of burlesques,--their eternal grimacing and

word-torturing and negro-singing and dancing. Themes for parody become

exhausted, and, without long surcease, would not bear repetition. You

may grow puns, like tobacco, until the soil is utterly worn out. The

burlesque-writers, too, exhibited signs of weariness and feebleness.

Planché retired into the Heralds' College. The cleverest of the Broughs

died. His surviving brother was stupid. Talfourd went to the law before

he found an early grave. Hale went to India. The younger generation were

scarcely fit to write pantomimes, and it was not always Christmas.

Besides, Robson had become a manager, and thought, perhaps, that

weightier parts became him. In copartnership with Mr. Emden, he had

succeeded Alfred Wigan as lessee of the Olympic, and there I hope he has

realized a fortune. But whenever his brief vacations occurred, and

actor-like he proceeded to turn them into gold by devoting to

performances in country-theatres those days and nights which should

properly have been given to rest and peace, he proved faithful to his

old loves, and _Jem Baggs_ and _Boots at the Swan_, _Medea_ and _the

Yellow Dwarf_, continued to be his favorite parts.

The popularity attained in England by this most remarkable of modern

actors has never, since the public were first aware of his qualities,

decreased. Robson is always sure to draw. The nights of his playing, or

of his non-playing, at the Olympic, are as sure a gauge of the receipts

as the rising and falling of the mercury in the thermometer are of the

variations of the temperature. A month's absence of Robson from London

always brought about an alarming depletion in the Olympic treasury.

Unhappily, these absences have of late years become more frequent, and

more and more prolonged. The health of the great tragi-comedian has

gradually failed him. I have been for a long period without news from

him; but I much fear that the heyday of his health and strength is past.

The errors which made Edmund Kean, in the prime of life, a shattered

wreck, cannot be brought home to Frederick Robson. Rumors, the wildest

and the wickedest, have been circulated about him, as about every other

public man; but, to the best of my knowledge and belief, they are wholly

destitute of foundation. _Don Basilio_, in Beaumarchais's play, might

have added some very pregnant advice to his memorable counsel,

"_Calomniez, calomniez, il en résultera toujours quelque chose_." He

should have taught the world--if the world wants teaching--_how_ to

calumniate. The following recipe will be found, I think, infallible. If

your enemy be a man of studious and retired habits, hint that he has

gone mad; if you see him alone at a theatre or at church, report that he

is separated from his wife; _and in any case, declare that he drinks_.

He can't disprove it. If he drinks water out-of-doors, he may drink like

a fish at home. If he walks straight on the street, he may reel in the

parlor.

Thus, scores of times, the gossip-mongers of English provincial

papers--the legion of "our own correspondents," who are a nuisance and a

curse to reputable society, wherever that society is to be found--have

attributed the vacillating health and the intermittent retirements from

the stage of the great actor to an over-fondness for brandy-and-water.

The sorrowful secret of all this is, I apprehend, that poor Robson has

for years been overworking himself,--and that latterly prosperity has

laid as heavy a tax upon his time and energy as necessity imposed upon

them when he was young. Dame Fortune, whether she smile, or whether she

frown, never ceases to be a despot. Over Dives and over Lazarus she

equally tyrannizes. In wealth and in poverty does she exact the pound of

flesh or the pound of soul. There are seasons in a man's life when

Fortune with a radiant savageness cries out to him, "Confound you! you

_shall_ make fifty thousand a year"; and she drives him onward to the

goal quite as remorselessly as ever slave-owner drove negro into a

rice-ground. The whip that is made of golden wire hurts quite as much, I

opine, as the cowhide. And when, at last, the fortunate man cries out,

"I am rich, I have enough, _Sat me lusistis, ludite nunc alios_, I will

work and fret myself no more, I will retire on my dividends, and sit me

down under my own fig-tree,"--Fortune dismisses him with a sneer:

"Retire, if you like!" cries the implacable, "but take hypochondria and

_ennui_, take gout and the palsy, with you."

I should be infinitely rejoiced to hear, when I go back, that Robson is

once more a hale and valid man. It is the tritest of platitudes to say

that he could ill be spared by the English stage. We never _can_ spare a

good actor. As well can we spare a good book or a good picture. But

there would be much cause for gratulation, if Robson were spared, ere

his powers definitively decline, to visit the United States. The

American people ought to see Robson. They have had our tragedians, good,

bad, and indifferent. They have filled the pockets of William Macready

and of Charles Kean with dollars. They have heard our men-singers and

our women-singers,--the birds that can sing, and the birds that can't

sing, but _will_ sing. The most notable of our drolls, Buckstone and

Keeley, have been here, and have received a cordial welcome. But Robson

has hitherto been lacking on this side the Atlantic. That he would be

thoroughly appreciated by the theatrical public of America I cannot for

one instant doubt. It is given to England to produce eccentrics, but for

other nations to understand them better than the English do. The Germans

are better critics of the satire of Hogarth, the French of the humor of

Sterne, and the Americans of the philosophy of Shakspeare, than we to

whose country those illustrious belong. In Boston, in New York, in

Philadelphia, crowded and enthusiastic audiences would, I venture to

foretell, hang on the utterances of Robson, and expound to their own

entire satisfaction his most eloquent by-play, his subtlest gestures. It

would be idle, in the endeavor to give him something like a palpable

aspect to people who have never seen him, to compare him with other

great actors yet extant, or who have gone before. In his bursts of

passion, in his vehement soliloquies, in the soul-harrowing force of his

simulated invective, he is said to resemble Edmund Kean; but how are you

to judge of an actor who in his comic moments certainly approaches the

image we have formed to ourselves of Munden and Dowton, of Bannister and

Suett? To say that he is a Genius, and the Prince of Eccentrics, is

perhaps the only way to cut the Gordian knot of criticism in his

instance.

Let me add, in conclusion, that Robson, off the stage, is one of the

mildest, modestest, most unassuming of men. Painfully nervous he always

was. I remember, a dozen years since, and when I was personally

unacquainted with him, writing in some London newspaper a eulogistic

criticism on one of his performances. I learned from friends that he had

read the article, and had expressed himself as deeply grateful to me for

it. I just knew him by sight; but for months afterwards, if I met him in

the street, he used to blush crimson, and made as sudden a retreat round

the nearest corner as was possible. He said afterwards that he hadn't

the courage to thank me. I brought him to bay at last, and came to know

him very well; and then I discovered how the nervousness, the

bashfulness, the _mauvaise honte_, which made him so shy and retiring in

private, stood him in wonderful stead on the stage. The nervous man

became the fretful and capricious tyrant of mock tragedy; the bashful

man warmed at the foot-lights with passion and power. The manner which

in society was a drawback and a defect became in the pursuit of his art

a charm and an excellence. What new parts may be created for Robson, and

how he will acquit himself in them, I cannot presume to prophesy; but it

is certain that he has already done enough to win for himself in the

temple of dramatic fame a niche all the more to be envied, as its form

and pattern must be, like its occupant, unprecedented and original.