------------------------------------------------------------------------ In a very early cast of the Garrick mask, still existing in London, the texture of the skin proves conclusively that it was taken from nature, and most probably from life. In the “Guild Hall” of “The City of Lushington,” an ancient and very unique social club, which has met for many years in a dark and dingy little back room connected with the Harp Tavern, in Russell Street, Covent Garden, London, are still preserved the chair of Edmund Kean, the hole in the wall made by the quart pot he threw once, in a fit of gross insubordination, at a former “Lord Mayor,” and what is religiously considered by all the citizens of Lushington to be a death-mask of Kean himself. This cast is covered with glass and with dust and its history is lost in the mists of time. There is no record of it in the metropolitan archives, the corporation will not permit it to be reproduced, even by photography, and it bears but little resemblance to Kean, or to the mask in my possession, which also has no history, but which I believe to be authentic, and which is certainly very like the sketch of Kean done in oils by George Clint, and now in the possession of Mr. Henry Irving. This hurried sketch of Clint’s is said to be the only portrait for which Kean could be induced to sit. It was made in Kean’s bedroom in a few hours, and it is the groundwork of more than one finished portrait of the same subject by the same artist. The portrait of Kean by Neagle, now the property of The Players, has a similar tradition. The Lushington cast is perhaps an early life-mask of the elder Kean, perhaps a life-mask, or a death-mask, of the younger Kean, more probably the mask of some defunct and commonplace and now forgotten mayor or alderman of Lushington, who did not even look like Kean. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration: EDMUND KEAN] ------------------------------------------------------------------------