Both Mr. Sothern and Mr. Jefferson have told the story of Tom Taylor’s extravaganza, “Our American Cousin,” in which the one as Dundreary, the other as Asa Trenchard, rose to almost instant popularity and fame. I shall not repeat it except to say that Jefferson’s Asa Trenchard was unlike any other the English or American stage has known. He played the raw Yankee boy, not in low comedy at all, but made him innocent and ignorant as a well-born Green Mountain lad might be, never a bumpkin; and in the scene when Asa tells his sweetheart the bear story and whilst pretending to light his cigar burns the will, he left not a dry eye in the house. New York had never witnessed, never divined anything in pathos and humor so exquisite. Burton and his friends struggled for a season, but Jefferson completely knocked them out. Even had Burton lived, and had there been no diverting war of sections to drown all else, Jefferson would have come to his growth and taken his place as the first serio-comic actor of his time. Rip Van Winkle was an evolution. Jefferson’s half-brother, Charles Burke, had put together a sketchy melodrama in two acts and had played in it, was playing in it when he died. After his Trenchard, Jefferson turned himself loose in all sorts of parts, from Diggory to Mazeppa, a famous burlesque, which he did to a turn, imitating the mock heroics of the feminine horse marines, so popular in the equestrian drama of the period, Adah Isaacs Menken, the beautiful and ill-fated, at their head. Then he produced a version of Nicholas Nickleby, in which his Newman Noggs took a more ambitious flight. These, however, were but the avant-couriers of the immortal Rip. Charles Burke’s piece held close to the lines of Irving’s legend. When the vagabond returns from the mountains after the twenty years’ sleep Gretchen is dead. The apex is reached when the old man, sitting dazed at a table in front of the tavern in the village of Falling Water, asks after Derrick Van Beekman and Nick Vedder and other of his cronies. At last, half twinkle of humor and half glimmer of dread, he gets himself to the point of asking after Dame Van Winkle, and is told that she has been dead these ten years. Then like a flash came that wonderful Jeffersonian change of facial expression, and as the white head drops upon the arms stretched before him on the table he says: “Well, she led me a hard life, a hard life, but she was the wife of my bosom, she was _meine frau!_”