Edwin Thomas Booth was born at Bel Air, Maryland, November 12, 1833. He was named Edwin, after his father's friend, Edwin Forrest, and Thomas, after Thomas Flynn, the actor, whom the elder Booth had known intimately in London. His son dropped the name of Thomas, later in life, and was only known to the public by the name of Edwin Booth. Owing to his father's wandering life Edwin had few advantages of education, but he made the most of his opportunities, and indeed was a student of good letters all his life, turning the light of all he learned from books and experience upon his art. His youth is described as reticent, and marked by a strong individuality, with a deep sympathy for his father, early manifested; his father, a much enduring, suffering man, strongly in need of sympathy, knowing to repay it, too, in kind. Edwin Booth made his first appearance on the stage in 1849 at the Boston Museum in the youthful part of Tressil, in Colley Cibber's version of Shakespeare's "Richard III." It had been against his father's wishes that he had adopted the stage as a profession; but, as his father had done in a like case before him he persevered, and soon had the satisfaction of convincing his parent that he had decided wisely. He did not at once come to New York after his success in Boston, but went to Providence and to Philadelphia, acting Cassio in "Othello," and Wilford in the "Iron Chest," a part he soon made his own and in which he made his first appearance in New York, playing at the National Theatre in Chatham Street, in 1850. The next year he played Richard III. for the first time, taking the part unexpectedly to fill the place of his father, who was suddenly ill. In 1852 he went out with his father to San Francisco, where his brother, Junius Brutus Booth, Jr., was the manager of a theatre; and the father and his two sons acted together. At Sacramento, we are told that the incident occurred which led Edwin Booth to think of acting Hamlet, a part which was to become as closely associated with his name as that of Richard III. was with his father. He was dressed for the part of Jaffier in Otway's play, "Venice Preserved," when some one said to him "You look like Hamlet, why not play it?" It was, however, some time before he ventured to assume the part. In October, 1852, the father and son parted, not to meet again. The elder Booth went to New Orleans, and after playing for a week took passage in a steamboat on the Mississippi, and catching a severe cold succumbed after a few days' illness and died. For a while after his father's death Edwin suffered greatly from poverty and from the hardships of his precarious life, unsustained as he now was by the affection and encouragement of a father who, with all his faults, and in all the misfortunes brought on by serious ill-health and some aberrations that were the effect of ill-health had always been an affectionate and true friend. But a