Of the grandeur and sublimity of the passion-tossed Orestes he gave so complete a picture that it was said—by that single character alone he might have reaped immortal fame.
On the other hand, his Biron was only a respectable performance; his Macbeth on a level with his Othello; his Richard and Sir Giles very inferior to Cooke's, still more so to those of Edmund Kean; and in comedy, generally, he was a very poor actor indeed, except in parts where he had to exercise dignity, express pathos, or pronounce a sentiment of moral tendency.
"Whene'er he tries the airy or the gay,
Judgment, not genius, marks the cold essay."
The judgment was not always sensibly exercised, for Kemble was undoubtedly
"For meaning too precise inclined to pore,
And labour for a point unknown before."
I think, in the old Roman habit he was most at his ease; there art, I am told, seemed less, nature more. In this respect he was exactly the reverse of Garrick, who could no more have competed with him in delineating the noble aim of the stern Coriolanus, than Kemble could have striven successfully against Garrick's Richard, or Abel Drugger.
And yet all the characters originally played by him, and successfully established on the stage, are of a romantic and not a classical cast. The prating patriot Rolla, the stricken, murmuring, lost Octavian, by which he sprung as many fountains of tears as his sister in the most heart-rending of her tragic parts; his chivalrous Cœur-de-Lion, his unapproachable Penruddock, his Percy ("Castle Spectre"), his Stranger, his de l'Epée, his Reuben Glenroy (the colloquial dialogue of which character, however, was always a burthen to him), and his De Montfort, are all romantic parts, to many of which he has given permanent life; while more classical parts for which he seemed more fitted, and in plays of equal merit at least, such as Cleombrotus ("Fate of Sparta"), Huniades (which certainly is not romantic),—his Pirithous, and his Sextus ("Conspiracy"), are all forgotten. That his sympathies were classical, may in some sort be accepted from the fact, that he began his public life in 1776 (the year of Garrick's farewell), at Wolverhampton, with Theodosius, and closed it, at Covent Garden, in 1817, with Coriolanus. That Kemble's own departure from the stage did not, as was once expected, prove its destruction, is to be gathered from the circumstance that while his farewell performances were in progress, Sheil's tragedy of the "Apostate" was produced at the same theatre, with a cast including the names of Young, Macready, C. Kemble, and Miss O'Neill!—and Kean was then filling Drury Lane with his Richard, Shylock, and Sir Giles.
Kemble's nearest approach to a fiasco was on his playing Sir Edward Mortimer. The "Iron Chest" had been ill-rehearsed, and Kemble himself was in such a suffering condition on the first night that he was taking opium pills as the curtain was rising. The piece failed, till Elliston essayed the principal part; and, on its failure, Colman published the most insulting of prefaces to the play, in which he remarked that "Frogs in a marsh, flies in a bottle, wind in a crevice, a preacher in a field, the drone of a bagpipe, all—all yielded to the inimitable and soporific monotony of Mr. Kemble!"