HENRY EDWARDS
Mrs. Asia Booth Clarke wrote of her brother in 1857: “He had come back [from California] older in experience only, for he looked a boy still, and very fragile; his wild black eyes and long locks gave him an air of melancholy. He had the gentle dignity and inherent grace that one attributes to a young prince; yet he was merry, cheerful, and boyish in disposition, as one can imagine Hamlet to have been in the days before the tragedy was enacted in the orchard.”
Mr. Barrett, who supported him in New York a few months later, said: “A slight, pale youth, with black, flowing hair, soft brown eyes, full of tenderness and gentle timidity, a manner mixed with shyness and quiet repose, he took his place [at the first rehearsal] with no air of conquest or self-assertion, and gave his directions with a grace and courtesy which never left him.”
Mr. Irving, recalling his earliest associations with Booth in Manchester, in 1861, has told me that the young actor seemed to him at that time to be the most magnificent specimen of intellectual manhood he had ever seen. And George William Curtis, writing in 1864, said: “Booth is altogether princely. His costume is still the solemn suit of sables, varied according to his fancy of greater fitness; and his small, lithe form, with the mobility and intellectual sadness of his face, and his large, melancholy eyes, satisfy the most fastidious imagination that this is Hamlet as he lived in Shakspere’s time.”
Mrs. M. E. W. Sherwood, speaking of him when he was in his perfect prime, in the part of Othello alludes to “that dark face to which the Eastern robe was so becoming, seeming at once to be telling its mighty story of adventure and conquest. It was a proud and beautiful face. Desdemona was not worthy of it.”
Booth’s face was to me one of the most beautiful and most lovable that I ever looked upon.
The only feminine heads in the collection graced once the shoulders of a trio of queens, a Queen of Tragedy, a Queen of Prussia, and a Queen of Song. The mask of Mrs. Siddons is in the possession of Mr. Percy Fitzgerald. It is generally accepted as having been taken from the actual face of the great actress, but its pedigree or its history Mr. Fitzgerald does not know.