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diadems. The "pomp and circumstance" of courts are well enough in their way,—but what becomes of them all before a single burst of passion?—they shrivel up, and are gone in a moment, like a leaf of an illuminated missal in the fire. It must be observed, however, that Mr Kean introduces this familiarity very sparingly, and in some characters not at all. In Macbeth, for example, for there it would be quite out of place. Macbeth is a king by usurpation, not by right; and he is weak as well as wicked; so that he has no self-possession, and is never at his ease. He perpetually feels his throne totter under him, and is glad of any prop, real or fancied, to support it. Unlike Richard III., he cannot afford to be familiar. In Othello, too, there is only one instance of this kind; but it is one of the finest things in the performance. It occurs in the last scene, when he learns the shallow artifices by which he has suffered himself to be duped. "Fool! Fool!" he exclaims three or four times over. "There be players that we have seen, and heard others praise, and that highly too," who, in expressing these words, rave, and tear their hair, and fall into mock agonies which cannot be described, because they cannot be felt. So does not Mr Kean. He feels no agony at the moment, because Shakspeare and nature do not tell him to feel any. He repeats the word over quickly, and almost inarticulately, and with a half smile of wonder at his incredible stupidity in having been such a "fool."

And this calls upon us to notice Mr Kean's exquisite taste and judgment—both theoretical and practical—both in conception and execution. These, if not the loftiest, are perhaps the most extraordinary of his qualifications,—considering the circumstances under which he must have acquired them. But we correct ourselves—he cannot have acquired them-they must be instinctive—we mean attendants upon, or parts of his genius. It is remarkable, too, that they were among the most striking of Shakspeare's qualities; a man bred up in the same school—the green-room of a theatre; and who studied in the same volume—his own heart. It is needless to multiply examples of the application of this exquisite taste and judgment. We give the first that occurs to us; and it will serve to illustrate our position, both with respect to Shakspeare and Kean. (We do not shrink from naming them in the same sentence.) The passage we allude to is in the third act of Othello. Immediately after the whirlwind of passion that ensues on the supposed discovery of his wife's infidelity, Othello exclaims—

The delivering of this passage is only less beautiful than the writing of it. It is the last breeze of summer sighing among the branches of a cypress-grove. It is the hollow, and not unmusical murmur of the midnight sea, after the tempest hath "raved itself to rest." If we were compelled to pass the rest of our days in a desert island, this would be among the few things we should remember, or desire to remember, of the world we had left behind us.

On February 5th, Mr Milman's Fazio was performed for the first time at Covent Garden Theatre.—We have some difficulty in speaking of this Tragedy. If we compare it with the crowd of wretched nothings, that have reigned paramount in our national theatres for these ten years past, we shall never have done praising it; but if we judge of it as of what it professes to be,—"an attempt at reviving our old national drama,"—we shall never have done finding fault.

Indeed this attempt to revive the old drama, has been the author's stumbling-block all through. He has powers that would have enabled him to construct a fine tragedy, if he had chosen to rely on them; but when he betrays a want of confidence in them, he must not wonder at their deserting him. Why should he have taken as a model "our old national drama?" He might have gone a much nearer and surer way to work.