His direct observations of other men, and his reflex researches on himself in his impassioned probationary assumptions of characters, struck to the automatic centres of his being, the seats of those intuitions which are historic humanity epitomized in the individual, or the spirit of nature itself inspiring man. And when he acted there was something so unitary and elemental in the unconscious depths from which his revelations seemed to break in spontaneous thunderbolts that sensitive auditors were filled with awe, utterly overwhelmed and carried away from themselves. Coleridge said that seeing him act Macbeth was like reading the play by flashes of lightning. In his most impassioned moods his voice suggested, by the tense intermittent vibration of his whole resonant frame revealed in it, the frenzied energy of a tiger. He spoke then in a stammering staccato of spasmodic outbursts which shook others because they threatened to shatter him. After years of maddening scorn, poverty, drudgery, neglect, he vaulted at one bound, with his first appearance as Shylock on the stage of Drury Lane, into an almost fabulous popularity, courted and fêted by the proudest in the land, and reaping an income of over fifty thousand dollars a year. No wonder he grew wild, reeling with all sorts of intoxication between the throne of the scenic king and the den of the ungirt debauchee. The essential peculiarity of Kean's greatness in his greatest effects was that his acting was then no effort of will, no trick or art of calculation, but nature itself uncovered and set free in its deepest intensity of power, just on the edge, sometimes quite over the verge, of madness. He penetrated and incorporated himself with the characters he represented until he possessed them so completely that they possessed him, and their performance was not simulation but revelation. He brought the truth and simplicity of nature to the stage, but nature in her most intensified degrees. His playing was a manifestation of the inspired intuitions, infallibly true and irresistibly sensational. It came not from the surfaces of his brain, but from the very centres of his nervous system, and suggested something portentous, preternatural, supernal, that blinded and stunned the beholders, appalled their imagination, and chilled their blood. This same curdling automatic touch Lucius Junius Brutus Booth also had; but it is asserted that he was first led to it by imitating Kean. At the time of his engagement in Albany, Kean was much marred and broken from his best estate by his bad habits. The intoxication of fame, the intoxication of love, and the dismal intoxication of stimulants snatched to keep his jaded faculties at their height, had done their sad work on him. Still, the habitudes of his genius lingered fascinatingly with him, and he delivered his climacteric points with almost undiminished power, between the cloudy intervals of his weariness striking lightning and eliciting universal shocks.