again at full length upon his sofa, and to pretend to be asleep as his guards had previously left him.  Kemble is said to have done this “as boldly and suddenly as if he had been shot.”  When people complimented him upon his unsuspected agility, he would answer:  “Nay, gentlemen, Mr. Boaden has exceeded all compliment upon this feat of mine, for he counselled me from Macbeth to ‘jump the life to come.’” “It was melancholy,” comments Mr. Boaden, recording the success of the play, “to see the abuse of such talents;” and then he adds the remarkable opinion:  “It is only in a barn that the Cato of a company should be allowed to risk his neck!”

Against “The Castle Spectre” the critics, of course, raised their voices.  Its popularity was viewed with much bitterness and jealousy.  “The great run the piece had,” writes the reverend author of “The History of the Stage,” “is a striking proof that success is a very uncertain criterion of merit.  The plot is rendered contemptible by the introduction of the ghost.”  “I hope it will not be hereafter believed,” cried Cooke the actor, “that ‘The Castle Spectre’ could attract crowded houses when the most sublime productions of the immortal Shakespeare could be played to empty benches.”  A dispute arising in the green-room of the theatre between Lewis and Sheridan, Lewis offered to bet all the money which the play had brought that he was in the right.  “No,” said Sheridan, “I can’t afford to bet so much as that; but I’ll tell you what I’ll do.  I’ll bet you all it’s worth.”  Still, there was no cavilling down the play.  The stage ghost was triumphant.  He had attained his apogee.  “The Castle Spectre” remained a stock piece for years, and has even appeared upon the stage in quite recent times.

Formerly the public had been satisfied with a very prosaic ghost.  A substantial figure, with a whitened face, and a streak of red paint on his brow, was thrust through a trap-door, and it was held that all had been done that was necessary in the way of stage illusion.  The ghost of Hamlet’s father was frequently attired in a suit of real armour borrowed from the Tower.  There is a story of a ghost thus heavily accoutred, who, overcome by the weight of his harness, fell down on the stage and rolled towards the foot-lights, the pit raising an alarm lest the poor apparition should indeed be burnt by the fires of the lamps.  Barton Booth, the great actor in the time of Queen Anne and George I., is said to have been the first representative of the ghost in “Hamlet” who wore list shoes to deaden the noise of his footsteps as he moved across the stage.  In the poem of “The Actor,” by Robert Lloyd, the friend of Churchill, published in 1757, we have an explicit description of the treatment of ghosts then in vogue upon the stage, with special reference to the ghost of “our dear friend” Banquo: