how any of them could be altered for the better.  No man could deliver brilliant dialogue—­the dialogue of Congreve or of Wycherley—­because none understood it—­half so well as John Kemble.  His Valentine, in Love for Love, was, to my recollection, faultless.  He flagged sometimes in the intervals of tragic passion.  He would slumber over the level parts of an heroic character.  His Macbeth has been known to nod.  But he always seemed to me to be particularly alive to pointed and witty dialogue.  The relaxing levities of tragedy have not been touched by any since him—­the playful court-bred spirit in which he condescended to the players in Hamlet—­the sportive relief, which he threw into the darker shades of Richard—­disappeared with him.  Tragedy is become a uniform dead weight.  They have fastened lead to her buskins.  She never pulls them off for the ease of a moment.  To invert a commonplace from Niobe, she never forgets herself to liquefaction.  John had his sluggish moods, his torpors—­but they were the halting stones and resting places of his tragedy—­politic savings, and fetches of the breath—­husbandry of the lungs, where nature pointed him to be an economist—­rather, I think, than errors of the judgment.  They were, at worst, less painful than the eternal tormenting unappeasable vigilance, the “lidless dragon eyes,” of present fashionable tragedy.  The story of his swallowing opium pills to keep him lively upon the first night of a certain tragedy, we may presume to be a piece of retaliatory pleasantry on the part of the suffering author.  But, indeed, John had the art of diffusing a complacent equable dulness (which you knew not where to quarrel with) over a piece which he did not like, beyond any of his contemporaries.  John Kemble had made up his mind early, that all the good tragedies, which could be written, had been written; and he resented any new attempt.  His shelves were full.  The old standards were scope enough for his ambition.  He ranged in them absolute—­and “fair in Otway, full in Shakspeare shone.”  He succeeded to the old lawful thrones, and did not care to adventure bottomry with a Sir Edward Mortimer, or any casual speculator that offered.  I remember, too acutely for my peace, the deadly extinguisher which he put upon my friend G.’s “Antonio.”  G., satiate with visions of political justice (possibly not to be realized in our time), or willing to let the sceptical worldlings see, that his anticipations of the future did not preclude a warm sympathy for men as they are and have been—­wrote a tragedy.  He chose a story, affecting, romantic, Spanish—­the plot simple, without being naked—­the incidents uncommon, without being overstrained.  Antonio, who gives the name to the piece, is a sensitive young Castilian, who, in a fit of his country honour, immolates his sister—­

But I must not anticipate the catastrophe—­the play, reader, is extant in choice English—­and you will employ a spare half crown not injudiciously in the quest of it.