Whose passions not his masters are; Whose soul is still prepared for death, Untied unto the worldly care Of public fame or private breath! Who envies none that chance doth raise, Or vice; who never understood How deepest wounds are given by praise, Nor rules of state, but rules of good. Who hath his life from humors freed, Whose conscience is his strong retreat; Whose state can neither flatterers feed, Nor ruin make accusers great. Who God doth late and early pray More of his grace than gifts to lend, And entertains the harmless day With a well-chosen book or friend. This man is freed from servile bands Of hope to rise, or fear to fall-- Lord of himself, though not of lands; And having nothing yet hath all. EDWIN BOOTH. ON AND OFF THE STAGE. Personal Recollections. BY ADAM BADEAU. The Friday before Booth was taken ill, I spent two or three hours with him in his rooms at the Players' Club, and while there it occurred to me that a picture, not of the actor merely, but of the man whom I had known for more than thirty years, in the glow of youth and the prime of manhood, down to the weary invalid, stricken before his time, in the characters that were not assumed--of husband, father, brother, son, and friend--would have an interest far beyond any critical analysis of his performances or historical account of his engagements. He did not object to my painting him as I had known him in the most intimate relations of his life--an actor is always used to being described and criticised--and he gave me incidents and information, all that I sought. Thus in what I have to say there will be nothing second-hand, nothing that he has not himself told me at one time or another, or that I have not observed in the friendship of a lifetime. I first met him when he was twenty-three, and I only twenty-five years old, and from that time till his marriage and my own entrance into the army we were as intimate as it is possible for two young men to be. I have the right, therefore, to tell what I shall unfold, for he gave it to me, and I have a further right in the certainty that nothing I can tell will depreciate his fame. If I portray all that I know, no one who reads will fail to think more highly and tenderly of the nature that was cloaked under Richard and Iago, suggested perhaps by points in Othello and Lear, but only really indicated in Hamlet, the melancholy, moody, dreamy, filial, tender Dane.