All of this would seem to be _ex parte_ evidence, but it is interesting nevertheless; and neither Mr. Macready, Mr. Kean, nor Miss Kemble, perhaps, was very far astray. On the other hand, George Henry Lewes (_On Actors and the Art of Acting_) says that "Macready's Hamlet was, in his opinion, bad, due allowance being made for the intelligence it displayed. He was lachrymose and fretful; too fond of a cambric pocket-handkerchief to be really effective.... It was 'a thing of shreds and patches,' not a whole." The flourishing of this handkerchief just before the play scene gave great offence to Forrest, who had the bad taste to hiss it in Edinburgh; and thus began the wretched feud which nearly convulsed two continents, and ended in bloodshed at Astor Place, New York. [Illustration: CHARLES KEMBLE.] Confessing that the elder Kean could not have surpassed the younger in certain melodramatic parts, Lewes adds that it was never an intellectual treat to see him (Charles Kean) play any of Shakspere's heroes; and the author of _The Actor_ says: "Charles Kean's Hamlet has many beauties, but he is physically disqualified to do justice to any character in tragedy.... Nature has given him a most unmelodious voice, the sound of which seems to flow rather through his nose than its appropriate organ, a face altogether unsuited to the character he attempts, and we doubt if she ever intended him for an actor." Apropos of Kean's difficulties in the utterance of certain of the consonants, particularly _m_ and _n_, the London _Punch_ acknowledged his antiquarian researches, and thanked him for having proved Shylock to be a vegetarian by his reading of the following lines: "You take my life When you do take the _beans_ whereby I live!" Macready described Charles Kemble as a first-rate actor in second-rate parts, and said that "in Hamlet he was Charles Kemble at his heaviest," while other critics dismiss his Hamlet as "passable." Thus do the doctors of criticism disagree.