There were some great actors in my young days. The infectious high spirits of the younger Charles Mathews, the solemn fun of Buckstone, Keeley, Toole and Paul Bedford at the Adelphi (the Paul-y-Tooly-technic, as some wag called it), Wigan and Leigh Murray, Benjamin Webster and many others were grand assets in the gaiety of the nation. It is something to have seen Charles Mathews in _London Assurance_, Wigan with his perfect French, in _The First Night_ (_Le Père de la Débutante_), Keeley and Leigh Murray in _The Camp at Chobham_. What perfection of acting! In light comedy and farce the English stage has always been richly endowed. Of tragedy perhaps the less said the better. In the early fifties Macready, Phelps and Charles Kean were supposed to be the shining lights among the tragedians—Macready, indeed, soon about to pass into a tradition.[34] To me they gave no pleasure. They seemed to rant and roar and mouth, tearing to tatters Othello, Shylock, Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear. Their methods were purely academic, mechanical and utterly unnatural. There was plenty of elocution, plenty of declamation—nothing spontaneous, nothing humanly possible; everything taught, nothing felt; of true emotion, begetting emotion in others, not a trace. I once, in 1856, saw _Othello_ played in a barn at Killarney; the Moor was rather drunk, but he was as academic as the great professors; between him and them there was small difference. It was a question of degree. But here am I daring to criticize when I do not even know the jargon of the trade. What is this that is come unto the son of Kish? Is Saul also among the critics? Be it my right to speak or not, I shall maintain that Robson, the meteoric man who for so short a time was a blazing light in the theatrical firmament, was the greatest actor that I ever saw on any stage at home or abroad. Upon him the mantle of Garrick had fallen, for there was no branch of his art that came amiss to him. He made his reputation in grotesque farces such as _The Wandering Minstrel_ and _Boots at the “Swan,”_ in which he showed the town masterpieces of eccentric character study; in burlesque he had no rival; and now and then, as in _The Yellow Dwarf_, he would burst into a fury of passionate acting without any suspicion of rant, that sent cold thrills through the house, making men feel what he would have been capable of achieving in tragedy.