George L. Fox was not always the clown and pantomimist of the _Humpty Dumpty_ absurdity in which he is now remembered. He excelled in burlesque, as his Hamlet and Richelieu and Macbeth have shown. As a Shaksperean comedian his Bottom ranks among the best within the memory of men still living, while in standard low comedy, melodramatic, and even in tragedy parts, he had no little experience and some decided success. He made his first appearance in 1830 at the Tremont Street Theatre, in Boston, when he was but five years of age. The play was _The Children of the Alps_, and the occasion a benefit to Charles Kean. He played Phineas Fletcher, in the drama of _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, during its famous run of so many nights at the National Theatre, New York, in 1853-54. He excelled as Mark Meddle, as Trip, as Jacques Strop, in _Robert Macaire_, as Tom Tape, in _Sketches in India_, as Box, as Cox, and as Sundown Bowse, in _Horizon_. [Illustration: HARRY HUNTER AS THE LONE FISHERMAN.] Bottom was his most finished and artistic assumption, Hamlet probably his most amusing, and Humpty Dumpty his most successful. He played the latter part some fifteen hundred times in New York and elsewhere. It was the last part he ever attempted to play, and only as a clown does he exist in the minds of the men of to-day who think of him at all. He first appeared in New York at the National Theatre, in 1850; he was last seen at Booth's Theatre on the 25th of November, 1875--the saddest clown who ever chalked his face. After twenty years of constant, faithful service as public jester--shattered in health, broken in spirit, shaken in mind--he disappeared forever from public view. Alas, poor Yorick!