daughter-in-law, Mrs. George Boker, records that Barrett made cuts in the play, preparatory to giving it, Boker, even, revising it in part.  The American premiere was reserved for James E. Murdoch, at the Philadelphia Walnut Street Theater, January 20, 1851, and it was revived at the same playhouse in April, 1855, by E.L.  Davenport.  As Stoddard says of it, one “should know something—­the more the better—­about the plays that Dr. Bird and Judge Conrad wrote for Forrest and his successors, about Poe’s ‘Politian’, Sargent’s ‘Velasco’, Longfellow’s ’Spanish Student’.”

His choice of subject, in this, his first drama, indicated the romantic aloofness of Boker’s mind, for he was always anxious to escape what Leland describes him as saying was a “practical, soulless, Gradgrind age.”  In fact, Boker had not as yet found himself; he was more the book-lover than the student of men he afterwards became.

“Read Chaucer for strength,” he advises Stoddard on January 7, 1850, “read Spenser for ease and sweetness, read Milton for sublimity and thought, read Shakespeare for all these things, and for something else which is his alone.  Get out of your age as far as you can.”

These young men were not quickly received, and they regarded the utilitarian spirit of the time as against them.  To Stoddard Boker once confessed:  “Were poetry forged upon the anvil, cut out with the axe, or spun in the mill, my heaven, how men would wonder at the process!  What power, what toil, what ingenuity!”

Boker’s correspondence with Stoddard began in a letter, dated September 5, 1849, announcing overtures made by the London Haymarket Theatre for his new tragedy, “Anne Boleyn,” which he was contemplating sending them in sheets.  “I have also the assurance,” he announces, “that Miss Cushman will bring it out in this country, provided she thinks her powers adapted to it.”

Boker’s pen was energetic, and it moved at a gait which shows how fertile was his imagination.  “The inseparables” cheered the way for each other in the face of official journalistic criticism.  Taylor declared “Anne Boleyn” far in advance of “Calaynos,” prophesying that it would last.  “Go ahead, my dear poet,” he admonishes, “it will soon be your turn to damn those who would willingly damn you.”  Together these friends were always planning to storm the citadel of public favour with poetry, but Boker seems to have been the only one to whom the theatre held out attraction.  By August 12, 1850, he was sending news to Stoddard that “The Betrothal” would be staged the following month.  In good spirits, he writes: 

The manager is getting it up with unusual care and splendour.  Spangles and red flannels flame through it from end to end.  I even think of appearing before the curtain on horseback, nay, of making the whole performance equestrian, and of introducing a hippopotamus in the fifth act.  What think you?  Have you and your miserable lyrics ever known such glory?  If the