A man who reads live books keeps himself alive, has a constant sense of what life means and what mind is. In reading Milton, a power is communicated to us, which, for the time, gives us the feeling of a capacity for doing any thing, from writing a Hamlet to whipping Tom Hyer. “My ——, sir,” said the artist who had been devouring Chapman’s Homer, “when I went into the street, after reading that book, men seemed to be ten feet high.” This exaltation of intelligence is simply a movement of our consciousness from the mechanical to the vital state, and to those whose common existence is in commonplaces such an exaltation occasions a shock of surprise akin to fear. In an art very closely connected with one of the highest forms of literature, the art of acting, we have another illustration of the fundamental antithesis, in processes and in results, between vitality and mechanism. Few, even among noted performers, have minds to conceive the characters they play; and it consequently is a rare thing to see a character really embodied and ensouled on the stage. The usual method is to give it piece by piece, and part by part, and the impression left on the audience is not the idea of a person, but an aggregation of personal peculiarities. Mr. Macready, for instance, has voice, action, understanding, grace of manner, felicity in points: but each is mechanical. His mind is hard and unfusible, never melts and runs into the mould of the individuality he personates, never imparts to the audience the peculiar life and meaning embodied by his author. His energy is not vital but nervous; his mode of arriving at character is rather logical than imaginative. He studies the text of Hamlet, infers with great precision of argument the character from the text, and plays the inference. Booth, on the contrary, who of all living actors has the most force and refinement of imagination, _conceives_ Hamlet as a person, preserves the unity of the person through all the variety in which it is manifested, and seems really to pass out of himself into the character. Macready leaves the impression of variety, but of a variety not drawn out of one fertile and comprehensive individuality: Booth gives the individuality with such power that we can easily conceive of even a greater variety in its expression without danger to its unity. The impression which Macready’s Hamlet leaves on the mind is an impression of Mr. Macready’s brilliant and versatile acting; the impression which Booth stamps on the imagination is the profound melancholy of Hamlet, underlying all his brilliancy and versatility. A man can witness Booth’s personation of Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear and Othello, with great delight, and with great accession of knowledge, after reading the deep Shakspearian criticism of Goethe, Schlegel and Coleridge: but every one feels it would be unjust to bring Macready to the test of such exacting principles.