of his profound belief in Dogberry, one may
say that he absorbed that Jackass into himself,
sublimated and enhanced the drollery of the
character, and made it all his own. The more
preposterous Dogberry, the more steeped and lost
in admiration he. When Dogberry was most
ridiculous, Verges wandered away through
the broadest realms of speculation, how the
Heavens ever came to make a man so
wondrous wise. It was a true triumph of Art.
Considered with a reference to the very few
words set down for Verges, it was certainly
the most finished and thoughtful piece of
suggestive comic acting that one can easily
imagine possible. And it culminated when his
asinine chief patted him on the head, and he
first bent under the honour, and then became
the taller for it, gazing into his patron's face
with an expression of fatuous contentment
perfectly marvellous.

In the melodrama of The Sergeant's Wife
where he and Mrs. Keeley played two innocent
fellow-servants in a murdering household, most
delightfully, his terrors were of the very finest
order of acting. We can see him now, when
the principal murderer, his master, patted him
on the head, and praised him for a good lad,
sinking and sinking under the bloodstained
hand until the hand stopped, finding nothing to
touch. In the Loan of a Lover, his Peter Spyk
had no approach to a parallel that ever we have
seen, on the English, French, or Italian stage.
Its immovable stolidity, and apparent insensibility
to everything but a big pipe, until he
made the tender discovery that he loved the little
woman who had grown up about him from a child
—and its pathos when that truth burst upon
him concurrently with the information that she
was going to be married to some one else—were
simply beyond praise. For the richest humour,
his reading of a letter in Betsy Baker may be
quoted; or his extraordinary devices for getting
out of the room, in Your Life's in Danger,
where he had to pass a man at breakfast who
he thought might stop him by the way.
Foremost among the pleasantest laughing faces
we have ever seen at a Theatre, is our
recollection of the Queen's face and its natural
unrestrained abandonment to the humour of
the scene, when, in A Thumping Legacy—
at Drury Lane in Mr. Macready's time years
ago—Keeley received the intelligence that
he had come to Corsica not so much to
inherit a property as to inherit a Vendetta,
and, in supreme vexation of spirit, suddenly
and surprisingly hit out at his informant after
the British manner. There was once an
unsuccessful piece at the Lyceum, founded on a
charming tale by Washington Irving. We do
not recal a single point in Keeley's part, except
that he had seen a ghost before the curtain
rose. That he had indubitably seen it, and that
he went about ever afterwards expecting to see
it again, the audience knew as well as he did
from the moment of his first entrance.

We are not thankful enough to great actors
for the relief they give us, and the good they
do us. These are but a few untwined Forget–
me–Nots scattered on a great actor's grave.
In private, he had the heart of a child, and
the integrity of the noblest man.

WEAVER, WIT, AND POET.

A HOTLY contested election in a large city
was just concluded, and the candidate of whose
committee I had been an active member, had
been returned at the head of the poll by a
very splendid majority of more than a thousand
ahead of his opponent. I was alone in the
committee-room, and in the very best of tempers,
when there walked in, unannounced, and very
much the worse for liquor, a person, whom in
these columns I will take the liberty of calling
Mr. Donaldson. He was a man of about fifty
years of age, unwashed, unkempt, and, as
regards attire, in a state of "looped and windowed
raggedness," that was distressing to behold.
And more pitiable even than his physical plight
was his moral degradation. I knew well who
he was, and what he wanted; and though (as
I said before) I was in very good humour with
myself and all the world, as one is apt to be in
the hour of success, I determined that I would
not comply with Mr. Donaldson's demand. It
was, as I anticipated, a request for money—for
the small sum of five shillings—which, to do Mr.
Donaldson justice, I must say he had very
fairly earned. Mr. Donaldson had been a
journeyman weaver—had a taste for reading
and writing—was a man of great natural
ability—had become a journalist, after a humble
fashion—had published a volume of poems,
which were neither very good nor very bad—
and was a capital hand at epigrammatic squibs,
both in prose and verse. In the composition of
these, which our committee had published in
the press and upon the walls of our city, he had
done good service to the victorious candidate.
He had received many sums of five and ten
shillings during the progress of the election,
and had spent them in drink. Had he been
sober when he presented himself before me, he
would, as a matter of course, have received his
five shillings and a little good advice: which,
not being a matter of course, it is more than
probable he would not have taken. But as he
was so painfully drunk, I resolved that I would
not, that day, add fuel to the flame that was
consuming him. I made him understand this,
as peremptorily as I could, but as he was not
savagely but only maudlin drunk, he was more
aggrieved than offended at my Rhadamantine
rigour, and appealed to my mercy rather than
to my justice. But I was obdurate, and made
him understand though not without considerable
difficulty that if he would return in the
morning, perfectly sober, "clothed, and in his
right mind," he should have ten shillings
instead of five, and the prospect of earning
something more on account of the election. It was
a long parley, and a very difficult victory to
win; but I won it, partly by threats, partly by
entreaties, and partly, I suppose, by the
electrical influence of a strong will over a weak