Consequently his career was a progressive one, and in his latest and mentally best days he gave impersonations of the loftiest and most difficult characters known in the drama which have hardly been surpassed. The prejudices against him as a strutting and robustious ranter who shivered the timbers of his hearers and tore everything to tatters were largely unwarranted at the outset, and for every year afterwards were a gross wrong. In the time of his herculean glory with the Bowery Boys it may be true that his fame was bottomed on the great lower classes of society, and made its strongest appeals through the signs he gave of muscle, blood, and fire; yet there must have been wonderful intelligence, pathos, and beauty, as well as naked power, to have commanded, as his playing did at that early day, the glowing tributes paid to him by Irving, Leggett, Bryant, Chandler, Clay, Conrad, Wetmore, Halleck, Ingraham, Lawson, and Oakes. He always had sincerity and earnestness. His audiences always felt his entrance as the appearance of a genuine man among the hollow fictions of the stage. His soul filled with power and passion by nature, without anything else was greater than everything else could be without this. A celebrated English actress generously undertook to train a young beginner, who was yet unknown, to assume higher parts. Tutoring her in the rôle of a princess neglected by the man she loved, the patroness could not get the pupil to make her concern appear natural. “Heaven and earth!” she exclaimed. “Suppose it real. Suppose yourself slighted by the man you devotedly loved. How would you act then in real life?” The hopeless reply was, “I? I should get another lover as quickly as I could.” The instructress saw the fatal, fatal defect of nature. She shut the book and gave no more lessons. Nature must supply the diamond which art polishes.