person, and, above all, a dogged ambition.  In after years, when his health began to fail and the sweets of success had, perhaps, become a trifle cloying, the tragedian often went through a part in a perfunctory manner.[A] But those early days in Ireland marked the sunrise of his genius—­a time no less noble, in its freshness and promise, than the later glory of the noontide—­and there was in his performance nothing but youthful ardour and devotion.

[Footnote A:  He (Booth) would play his best to a single man in the pit whom he recognised as a playgoer, and a judge of acting; but to an unappreciating audience he could exhibit an almost contemptuous disinclination to exert himself.  On one occasion of this sort he was made painfully sensible of his mistake and a note was addressed to him from the stage-box, the purport of which was to know whether he was acting for his own diversion or in the service and for the entertainment of the public?  On another occasion, with a thin house and a cold audience, he was languidly going through one of his usually grandest impersonations, namely, Pyrrhus.  At his very dullest scene he started into the utmost brilliancy and effectiveness.  His eye had just previously detected in the pit a gentleman, named Stanyan, the friend of Addison and Steele, and the correspondent of the Earl of Manchester.  Stanyan was an accomplished man and a judicious critic.  Booth played to him, with the utmost care and corresponding success.  “No, no!” he exclaimed, as he passed behind the scenes, “I will not have it said at Button’s that Barton Booth is losing his powers!”—­DR. DORAN.]

With that ardour, only whetted by his popularity in Dublin, Barton travelled to London (1701), and there offered respectful incense at the shrine of Betterton.  ’Twas a shrine at which the public still worshipped; and when Roscius extended a helping hand to the kneeling postulant, and brought him before the patrons of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the success of Booth seemed assured.  The latter never forgot the generosity and kindly interest of his idol, and he spoke with all the sincerity of gratitude when he once said:  “When I acted the Ghost with Betterton (as Hamlet), instead of my awing him, he terrified me.  But divinity hung round that man.”  Had he been of an egotistic mould Barton might have added, that his Ghost was considered hardly less effective than the Hamlet of the mighty Betterton.

For a decade, or longer, Booth went on this prosperous way, gaining in favour with the theatre-goers, and increasing his artistic resources.  During this period he married the daughter of a baronet, and she lived for six years, but not long enough to witness his triumphs in the “Distressed Mother” and the classic “Cato.”  As Chetwood well said, “Pyrrhus in the ‘Distressed Mother’ placed him in the seat of Tragedy, and Cato fixed him there.”  We have already read something of the “Distressed Mother,” and of the production of Addison’s tragedy, and so there is no need to linger over the episodes which caused Booth to be acclaimed Betterton’s logical successor.