William Robson, in his “Old Play-Goer,” says of Edmund Kean, “His person and carriage are mean and contemptible, his judgment poor, his pathos weak, his passion extravagant and unnatural;” and then sums up his estimate of the immortal histrionist in these remarkable words: “He is nothing but a little vixenish black girl in short petticoats!” On the first appearance of Kean in Philadelphia some critics there, who were great admirers of Cooke, called him “a quack, a mountebank, a vulgar impostor.” William B. Wood said of Kean, when he had just finished a rehearsal and gone out, “He is a mere mummer.” Joseph Jefferson, great- grandfather of the Joseph Jefferson of Rip Van Winkle fame,—a beautiful and noble old man, afterwards characterized by Forrest in loving memory as “one of the purest men that ever lived, sad, sweet, lofty, thoughtful, generous,”—overheard the remark, and replied, with a quiet indignation in his tone, “Ah, Wood, you would give all the riches you ever dreamed of amassing in this world to be another just such a mummer.” The “London Spectator,” in 1836, said, “Bunn in his drowning desperation catches at any straw. He has just put forward Booth, the shadow and foil of Kean in bygone days. Booth’s Richard seems to have been a wretched failure.” At the same time another English journal used the following expressive language, in which the writer evidently does justice to himself whatever he endeavors to do to the actors he names: “Since the retirement of Young and the death of Kean, the very name of tragedy has passed away from us. We have had to submit to the presumptuous and uninspired feelings of Mr. Bell-wether Kemble, or to the melodramatic jerks and pumpings of Mr. Macready.”