There is no doubt, however, that _Davy Crockett_, like _Metamora_, owes much of its success to the actor who plays its titular part. Mr. Frank Mayo's performance of this backwoods hero is a gem in its way. He is quiet and subdued, he looks and walks and talks the trapper to the life, never overacts, and never forgets the character he represents. He first played _Davy Crockett_ in Rochester in November, 1873, producing it in New York at Niblo's Garden on the 9th of March, 1874, when he had the support of Miss Rosa Rand as Eleanor Vaughn, the heroine who looked down to blush and who looked up to sigh, with a smile on her lip and a tear in her eye, and who made in the part a very favorable impression. The play has never been properly appreciated by metropolitan audiences. Free from tomahawking and gun-firing, it does not attract the lovers of the sensational; utterly devoid of emotional and harrowing elements, it does not appeal to the admirers of the morbid on the stage; and, giving no scope for richness of toilet, it has no charms for the habitual attendants upon matinee entertainments. [Illustration: Frank Mayo, as "Davy Crockett."] Its reception by the press was not cordial or kindly, and the severe things written about it had, it is said, such an effect upon its sensitive author that he literally died of criticism in Philadelphia, November 13, 1872. Frank H. Murdoch was a nephew of James E. Murdoch, the old tragedian, and was himself an actor of some promise. His single play was of so much promise that if there were an American Academy to crown such productions it might have won for him at least one leaf of the laurel. SCENE IV. THE STAGE AMERICAN IN THE CHARACTER PLAY. "What hempen homespuns have we swaggering here?" _A Midsummer-Night's Dream_, Act iii. Sc. 1. The typical and accepted American of the stage, the most familiar figure in our dramatic literature, is a Jonathan, an Asa Trenchard, a Rip Van Winkle, a Solon Shingle, a Bardwell Slote, a Mulberry Sellers, and a Joshua Whitcomb; and even he does not always figure in the American play as it is here defined. [Illustration: WILLIAM J. FLORENCE AS BARDWELL SLOTE.]