Jonathan, of whom something has already been said, is now extinct and defunct. Asa Trenchard is the creation of an Englishman (Tom Taylor), brought to perfection by the genius of Mr. Jefferson. Rip Van Winkle, as has been said before, is a Dutchman taken from the pages of Irving's familiar tale, and so accentuated by the genius of this same Jefferson in the present generation, that the fact that he had distinguished predecessors in the same character, but in other dramatizations of the story, is almost forgotten now. Hackett was the original Rip in 1830. Of his performance Sol Smith wrote then: "I should despair of finding a man or a woman in an audience of five hundred who could hear Hackett's utterance of five words in the second act, 'But she vas mine vrow,' without experiencing some moisture in the eyes." The second Rip Van Winkle was Charles Burke, a half-brother of Mr. Jefferson who considers Burke's the best Rip Van Winkle of the trio. He was the author of his own version of the play. Concerning his "_Are we so soon forgot?_" L. Clarke Davis quotes John S. Clarke as saying: "It fell upon the senses like the culmination of all mortal despair, and the actor's figure, as the low sweet tones died away, symbolized more the ruin of a representative of a race than the sufferings of an individual. His awful loss and loneliness seemed to clothe him with a supernatural dignity and grandeur which commanded the sympathy and awe of his audience." Mr. Clarke adds that in supporting Mr. Burke in this part night after night, and while perfectly aware of what was coming, and even watching for it, when these lines were spoken his heart seemed to rise in his throat, and his eyes were wet with tears. The _Rip Van Winkle_ which Mr. Jefferson has played so often on both sides of the Atlantic is his own version of the story, somewhat elaborated by Mr. Boucicault; and Mr. Jefferson's Rip Van Winkle is Rip Van Winkle himself. It was Charles Burke who first discovered the possibilities lying dormant in the character of Solon Shingle, a sort of Yankee juvenile Paul Pry, in a two-act drama called _The People's Lawyer_, by Dr. J. S. Jones. "Yankee" Hill and Joshua Silsbee--both admirable representatives of Yankee character parts--played Solon Shingle as a young man, with all of the "Down-East" characteristics which distinguish stage Down-Easters; and it was not until he fell into the hands of Burke that he became the simple-minded, phenomenally shrewd old man from New England, with a soul which soared no higher than the financial value of a bar'l of apple-sass. Until Mr. Owens, the last of the Solon Shingles, died and took Solon Shingle with him, the drivelling old farmer from Massachusetts was as perfect a specimen of his peculiar species as our stage has ever seen.