The attempt, in short, was unsuccessful; so had that of many an aspirant been who subsequently reaped triumphs at his will; and Mr. Charles Kean might find consolation. The attempt, at all events, enabled him to fix his foot on the first step of the giddy ascent; and, let it be said, he owed the possibility of doing so entirely to his father's name. So young a man, without a great name, would have found no access to Drury open to him; and I like to think, that if he missed the fortune which his half mad, yet kindly impulsive father had promised him, he owed to that father the foundations on which he raised another. He inherited a great name and a great warning.
While the son was anxiously and painfully laying those foundations, the sire was absolutely electrifying audiences at Covent Garden by old flashes of his might, or disappointing them by his incapacity, or his capricious absence. He reminded me of Don Juan, who, though he went with open eyes recklessly to destruction, flung off the fiends who at last grasped him, with a fearful, but vainly expended energy. On one night, when he played Othello to Young's Iago, the Cassio of Charles Kemble, the Roderigo of Farley, and the Desdemona of Miss Jarman, I saw strong men clamber from the pit, over the lower boxes, to escape suffocation, and weak men, in a fainting condition, passed by friendly hands towards the air, in the same way. I remember Charles Kemble, in his lofty, bland way, trying to persuade a too-closely packed audience to fancy themselves comfortable, and to be silent, which they would not be till he appeared, who, on that, and some after nights, could subdue them to silence or stir them into ecstasy, at his will.
To those who saw him from the front, there was not a trace of weakening of any power in him. But, oh ye few who stood between the wings where a chair was placed for him, do you not remember the saddening spectacle of that wrecked genius—a man in his very prime, with not merely the attributes of age about him, but with some of the infirmities of it, which are wont to try the heart of love itself. Have you forgotten that helpless, speechless, fainting mass bent up in that chair; or the very unsavoury odour of that very brown, very hot, and very strong brandy-and-water, which alone kept alive the once noble Moor? Aye, and still noble Moor; for when his time came, he looked about as from a dream, and sighed, and painfully got to his feet, swayed like a column in an earthquake, and in not more time than is required for the telling of it, was before the audience, as strong and as intellectually beautiful as of old;—but only happy in the applause which gave him a little breathing space, and saved him from falling dead upon the stage.
During a few nights of another year or two, he acted under the exacting conditions of a nature that had been violated. He gained a little strength from his island home in Bute, and even acted in Glasgow, Cork, and Dublin with his son, in whose success he took a father's part. Thrice he essayed fresh study, and once he nearly conquered; his Virginius, in Knowles's play, was superbly affecting, in fragmentary passages, but he tried it at too late a period, not of his natural life, but of his professional career. Richard II. was magnificently got up for him, but as the curtain was about to rise, it was discovered that he was not in the house—and days passed before he emerged into the world and decency. His last essay in a new part was in "Henry V.;" but he broke down, addressed the audience deprecatorily, muttered something about being the representative of Shakspeare's heroes, and lamented, at little more than forty, what Macklin did not plead till he was past ninety—his decaying memory.
Now and then the town saw him, but his hold on it was nearly gone. He was now at the Haymarket; and then, uncertainly, at Drury Lane; and again at the Haymarket in 1832, where I saw him for the last of many times, in Richard. The sight was pitiable. Genius was not traceable in that bloated face; intellect was all but quenched in those once matchless eyes; and the power seemed gone, despite the will that would recall it. I noted in a diary, that night, the above facts, and, in addition, that by bursts he was as grand as he had ever been,—that though he looked well as long as he was still, he moved only with difficulty, using his sword as a stick. I find, and perfectly remember, that there was a murmur of approbation at the pause and action of his extended arm, as he said—"In the deep bosom of the ocean,—buried!"—as if he consigned all lowering clouds to the sea. At—"The dogs bark at me, as I halt by them;" the action was so expressive as to elicit a round of applause; and in the last of the lines—
"Why what a peevish fool was he of Crete,
Who taught his son the office of a fowl,
And yet for all his wings, the fool was drowned,"
the playful yet fiendish sarcasm was delivered with marvellous effect. His words, after "Die, prophet, in thy speech,"—"For this among the rest was I ordained," seemed like a devilish joke after a burst of fury. In—
"Villains, set down the corse, or by St. Paul,