Hester had vainly imagined that she herself might be the destined prophetess, but had long since recognised the impossibility that any mission of divine and mysterious truth should be confided to a woman stained with sin, bowed down with shame, or even burdened with a life-long sorrow. The angel and apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman, indeed, but lofty, pure, and beautiful; and wise, moreover, not through dusky grief, but the ethereal medium (of joy; and showing how sacred love should make us happy, by the truest test of a life successful to such an end."

We regret that we cannot now give further extracts from this romance, illustrative of the author's delicate sentiment and mystical imagination, as well as of his suggestiveness and originality. He has the purest and loftiest ideas of love and virtue. Unlike Thackeray, he never indulges in petty and contemptible sneers at women, nor dwells with exquisite delight upon their timorous debasement and self-humiliation. He does not stop to prove that "they are born timid and tyrants," and are terrified into humility, and bullied and frightened into devotion.

EDWIN BOOTH'S MACBETH.

Ir has been said that many gifts and accomplishments must meet in him who would be a commentator upon Shakspeare; that in this case, to know something of everything, but everything of something, is necessary for

success.

But great as are the attributes required of a commentator, incomparably greater must be the gifts of the actor of Shakspeare. He must be a being who can rise superior to time and place, for the thoughts and passions he is to express and delineate belong not only to the past and the present, but to the future. His mind must be capable of comprehending the arts and sciences. He must be versed not only in history, but in the philosophy of history. He must be a student of nature and a judge of nature, and, above all, of character. He must possess the quality of identifying himself with the being he is to personate. He must be his own teacher, for if he stoops to imitation he degrades his art. Hence it is that our greatest actors have been the greatest innovators on the customs and manners of others. The innovations of Garrick on the style of acting adopted by Quin and Betterton, were such as for a time to make him very unpopular. Kemble attempted to set up a school of his own, and in some respects succeeded. Both Garrick and Kemble were men of fine scholastic attainments, but the former, in spite of his many excel

lences, represented MACBETH as a blustering and cowardly tyrant, who thought only of blood and murder, as a being wholly destitute of any redeeming traits whatever.

Byron was accustomed to say that of actors Cooke was the most natural, Kemble the most supernatural, and Kean the medium between the two, and that Mrs. Siddons was worth them all put together. He did not, however, record any opinion of Junius Brutus Booth, who combined excellences that did not belong to any of the above-named. But, to judge from contemporaneous criticism, and the traditions of the stage, EDWIN BOOTH, the son of Junius Brutus, has surpassed in the power and brilliancy of his genius all the great actors who have gone before him. He seems to have taken the lovers of the drama, as it were, by storm. He has brought to bear upon his profession the rarest personal gifts and the most superior mental accomplishments. He has revealed beauties in Shakspeare that were undreamed of before. He has thrust aside old stage tricks and customs. He has shown us the folly of set speeches and pompous intonations. He has completely charmed us with the varied witchery of his powers. He has aspired to the universal in the realms of art and knowledge, and success has crowned his efforts. We can

account very readily for his success in some of his characters, for instance, in Hamlet, for the character is not wholly unlike his own. His handsome person, elegant graces and quiet dignity, combined with his wealth of voice, are eminently fitted for the sublimest representations of this great conception of Shakspeare.

The mournful words,

"I have of late, but wherefore I know not,

Lost all my mirth, foregone all customs of exercises,"

seem to bespeak his own sentiments and passions. The

same thing can be said of the soliloquy on suicide, whilst the friendship of Rosencranz and Guildenstern, the deferred. but deeply-seated revenge, the wild love for Ophelia and the philosophical meditations at her grave, the chivalric bearing towards Laertes, the speech,

"If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not come yet, it will come. The readiness is all, since no man of aught knows what is't to leave betimes. Let be,"

And all Hamlet's thoughts, speeches, words and actions. are anything else but foreign to the proud and sensitive and philosophical and poetical nature of EDWIN BOOTH.

But by what wondrous power doth he transform himself into the bloody Thane of Cawdor, and fearlessly visit the blasted heath, invoke the magic spell of the weird sisters, look on death itself, and sleep in spite of thunder? The question must remain unanswered. It is inexplicable. We only know that it is the exclusive gift and prerogative of genius.

BOOTH studied the character of MACBETH thoroughly and completely before he attempted to portray it. His Hamlet, we believe, has been slowly perfected by study, time and thought; but there has been no improvement in his MACBETH since his appearance in the character, nor can there be any, for he mastered it from the beginning. If he does not play it as well at one time as at another, it is from sheer lack of physical force. He seizes at once upon the imagination, and holds us spell-bound until the end of the drama, and we cannot break the spell if we would.

His appearance upon the stage, heralded by distant strains of martial music, and the exclamation of the weird sisters,

"A drum! a drum! MACBETH doth come!"

presents a picture of the grandest magnificence. We

realise the approach of all the splendid pageantry of war and the glory of a conqueror. He is proudly followed by his victorious army, that beat back "Norway himself with terrible numbers." He surveys majestically their burnished shields, waving banners and glittering spears. His brow is flushed with triumph, and every look and movement bespeaks the conqueror, whose brandished sword but an hour before smoked with bloody execution.

The warlike cry

"Command! they halt upon the heath!"

is distinctly heard. The pictured representation of that dreary moorland consecrated to infernal orgies, with not a tree or shrub to relieve the desolation, where murky fogs are ever settling upon pestilential pools, becomes a reality. How strangely sound the foreboding words,

"So fair and foul a day I have not seen!"

How prophetic of the coming evil, of the workings of the powers of darkness, of the weird sisters, the wild and secret midnight hags, who keep the word of promise to the ear and break it to the hope! Only those who have seen BOOTH'S MACBETH can form the least idea of the expression of his countenance on beholding the weird sisters. There is something about it that affects us with mingled admiration and awe. When these foul anomalies greet him as "Thane of Glamis," "Thane of Cawdor," and as "All hail Macbeth, that shall be King hereafter," we feel that he is indeed under the influence of superhuman beings, who are to control his destiny and urge him on to his fate. He seems to believe all their predictions possible. He does not listen, like Banquo, passively, neither begging nor fearing, but his whole being is moved. He is lost in thought; wrapped withal. When they are about to quit his sight, we hear with strange emotion the speech: