his earlier professional life, says, "He used to mope about for hours, walking miles and miles alone with his hands in his pockets, thinking intensely on his characters. No one could get a word from him; he studied and slaved beyond any actor I ever knew." Neither did he relax his labors when he had reached the highest pinnacle of fame. It is related of him, that when studying Maturin's Bertram, he shut himself up for two days to study the one line, "Bertram has kissed the child!" It made one of those electrical effects which from their vividness were supposed to be merely impulsive. His wife said her husband would often stand up all night before a pier glass in his chamber, endeavoring to acquire the right facial expression for some new part. John Kemble's new readings of Hamlet were many and strange, and excited much comment. "The performance was eminently graceful, calm, deep studied--during his life he wrote out the entire part forty times--but cold and unsympathetic." As to orators, the greatest of antiquity were not ashamed to confess the industry of the closet. Demosthenes gloried in the smell of the lamp; and it is recorded of Cicero, that he not only so laboriously prepared his speeches, but even so minutely studied the effect of their delivery, that on one occasion, when he had to oppose Hortensius, the reiterated rehearsals of the night before so diminished his strength as almost to incapacitate him in the morning. Lord Erskine corrected and corrected his very eloquent orations, and Burke literally worried his printer into a complaint against the fatigue of his continual revises. Indeed, it is said, such was the fastidiousness of his industry, that the proof-sheet not unfrequently exhibited a complete erasure of the original manuscript. Whitefield's eloquence was a natural gift improved by diligent study; and Garrick said that each repetition of the same sermon showed a constant improvement,--as many as forty repetitions being required before the discourse reached its full perfection. "I composed," says Lord Brougham, "the peroration of my speech for the queen, in the Lords, after reading and repeating Demosthenes for three or four weeks, and I composed it twenty times over at least, and it certainly succeeded in a very extraordinary degree, and far above any merits of its own." He says that Erskine wrote down word for word the passage about the savage and his bundle of sticks. His mind having acquired a certain excitement and elevation, and received an impetus from the tone and quality of the matured and premeditated composition, retained that impetus, after the impelling cause had died away. Webster, it is said, was in the habit of writing and re-writing most of the fine passages of his senatorial and forensic speeches, and sometimes prepared them, in order that they might afterward be introduced when occasion should offer. He was wont to say that the following passage in his speech upon President Jackson's