Three months after his birth his mother deserted him, leaving him, without a word of apology or regret, to the care of the woman who had befriended her in her trouble.  When he was but three years old he was brought, amongst a number of other children, to Michael Kelly who was then bringing out the opera of Cymon at the Opera House in the Haymarket, and, thanks to his personal beauty, he was selected for the part of Cupid.  Shortly afterwards he found his way to Drury Lane, where the handsome baby—­for he was little more—­figured among the imps in the pantomime.  Taught here the tricks of the acrobat, he had at four years old acquired such powers of contortion that he was fit to rank as an infant phenomenon.  But the usual result followed:  the little limbs became deformed, and had to be put in irons, by means of which they regained that symmetry with which nature had at first endowed them.  Three years afterwards, in March, 1794, John Kemble was acting Macbeth at Drury Lane; and, in the “cauldron scene,” he engaged some children to personate the supernatural beings summoned by the witches from that weird vessel.  Little Edmund with his irons was the cause of a ridiculous accident, and the attempt to embody the ghostly forms was abruptly abandoned.  But the child seems to have been pardoned for his blunder, and for a short time was permitted by the manager to appear in one or two children’s parts.  Little did the dignified manager imagine that the child—­who was one of his cauldron of imps in Macbeth—­was to become, twenty years later, his formidable rival—­formidable enough to oust almost the representative of the Classical school from the supremacy he had hitherto enjoyed on the Tragic stage.  In Orange Court, Leicester Square, where Holcroft, the author of The Road to Ruin, was born, Edmund Kean received his first education.  Scanty enough it was, for it had scarcely begun before his wretched mother stepped in and claimed him; and, after her re-appearance, his education seems to have been of a most spasmodic character.  Hitherto, the child’s experience of life had been hard enough.  When only eight years of age he ran away to Portsmouth, and shipped himself on board a ship bound to Madeira.  But he found his new life harder than that from which he had escaped, and, by dint of feigning deafness and lameness, he succeeded in procuring his removal to an hospital at Madeira, whence, the doctors finding his case yielded to no remedies, the authorities kindly shipped him again to England.  He insisted on being deaf and lame:  indeed, so deaf that in a violent thunder-storm he remained perfectly unmoved, explaining his composure by declaring that he could not hear any noise at all.  From Portsmouth he made his way on foot to London.  On presenting himself at the wretched lodgings where his mother lived, he found that she had gone away with Richardson’s troupe.  Penniless and half-starving, he suddenly thought of his uncle, Moses Kean, who lived in Lisle