delight, as if he already clenched the bauble, and held it in his grasp.  The courtship scene with Lady Anne is an admirable exhibition of smooth and smiling villainy.  The progress of wily adulation, of encroaching humility, is finely marked by his action, voice and eye.  He seems, like the first Tempter, to approach his prey, secure of the event, and as if success had smoothed his way before him.  The late Mr. Cooke’s manner of representing this scene was more vehement, hurried, and full of anxious uncertainty.  This, though more natural in general, was less in character in this particular instance.  Richard should woo less as a lover than as an actor—­to show his mental superiority, and power of making others the playthings of his purposes.  Mr. Kean’s attitude in leaning against the side of the stage before he comes forward to address Lady Anne, is one of the most graceful and striking ever witnessed on the stage.  It would do for Titian to paint.  The frequent and rapid transition of his voice from the expression of the fiercest passion to the most familiar tones of conversation was that which gave a peculiar grace of novelty to his acting on his first appearance.  This has been since imitated and caricatured by others, and he himself uses the artifice more sparingly than he did.  His by-play is excellent.  His manner of bidding his friends ‘Good night’, after pausing with the point of his sword drawn slowly backward and forward on the ground, as if considering the plan of the battle next day, is a particularly happy and natural thought.  He gives to the two last acts of the play the greatest animation and effect.  He fills every part of the stage; and makes up for the deficiency of his person by what has been sometimes objected to as an excess of action, The concluding scene in which he is killed by Richmond is the most brilliant of the whole.  He fights at last like one drunk with wounds; and the attitude in which he stands with his hands stretched out, after his sword is wrested from him, has a preternatural and terrific grandeur, as if his will could not be disarmed, and the very phantoms of his despair had power to kill.—­ Mr. Kean has since in a great measure effaced the impression of his Richard III by the superior efforts of his genius in Othello (his masterpiece), in the murder-scene in Macbeth, in Richard ii, in sir Giles overreach, and lastly in OROONOKO; but we still like to look back to his first performance of this part, both because it first assured his admirers of his future success, and because we bore our feeble but, at that time, not useless testimony to the merits of this very original actor, on which the town was considerably divided for no other reason than because they were original.

The manner in which Shakespeare’s plays have been generally altered or rather mangled by modern mechanists, is a disgrace to the English stage.  The patch-work Richard III which is acted under the sanction of his name, and which was manufactured by Cibber, is a striking example of this remark.