"Eight years ago a youth came to this city unheralded and almost unknown. His first introduction to the community was through one of those acts of kindness on his part by which his whole subsequent career has been distinguished. To add a few dollars to the slender means of a poor but industrious and worthy native actor, this youth, his diffidence overcome by his sympathy, appeared in the arduous character of Othello before a metropolitan audience. What was the astonishment and delight of the spectators when, instead of a raw and ungainly tyro, they beheld one who needed only a few finishing touches to render him the peer of the proudest in his art! A rival theatre was then rapidly rising under the superintendence of a man who has had few superiors as a director of the mimic world of the stage. To this theatre the unheralded youth (now the 'observed of all observers') was speedily transferred, and during the most brilliant period of its history was its 'bright particular star.' Allured by the strange and attractive light, the wealth, the talent, the fashion and respectability of the city nightly crowded its benches. The carriages of the luxurious were drawn up in long retinue before its doors, and the laborious left their tasks and repaired in throngs to sit entranced beneath the actor's potent spell. Not Goodman's Fields, when Garrick burst, a kindred prodigy, on the astonished London audience, displayed nightly a gayer scene nor resounded with heartier plaudits. "Such success naturally elicited from rival theatres the most splendid offers; yet, though earning a poor stipend and held but by a verbal tie, this honorable boy--his prospects altered but his mind the same--gave promptly such replies as showed that he valued integrity at its proper price. I shall be pardoned for thus adverting to one such instance among the many that might be adduced as finely illustrative of his character to whose honor it is mentioned.