In Lear and in Othello,--as in Virginius,--the predominant quality of McCullough's acting was a profound and beautiful sincerity. His splendidly self-poised nature--a solid rock of truth, which enabled him, through years of patient toil, to hold a steadfast course over all the obstacles that oppose and amid all the chatter that assails a man who is trying to accomplish anything grand and noble in art--bore him bravely up in those great characters, and made him, in each of them, a stately type of the nobility of the human soul. As the Moor, his performance was well-nigh perfect. There was something a little fantastic, indeed, in the facial style that he used; and that blemish was enhanced by the display of a wild beast's head on the back of one of Othello's robes. The tendency of that sort of ornamentation--however consonant it may be deemed with the barbaric element in the Moor--is to suggest him as heedful of appearances, and thus to distract regard from his experience to his accessories. But the spirit was true. Simplicity, urged almost to the extreme of barrenness, would not be out of place in Othello, and McCullough, in his treatment of the part, testified to his practical appreciation of that truth. His ideal of Othello combined manly tenderness, spontaneous magnanimity, and trusting devotion, yet withal a volcanic ground-swell of passion, that early and clearly displayed itself as capable of delirium and ungovernable tempest. His method had the calm movement of a summer cloud, in every act and word by which this was shown. For intensity and for immediate, adequate, large, and overwhelming response of action to emotion, that performance has not been surpassed. There were points in it, though, at which the massive serenity of the actor's temperament now and then deadened the glow of feeling and depressed him to undue calmness; he sometimes recovered too suddenly and fully from a tempest of emotion--as at the agonising appeal to Iago, "Give me a living reason she's disloyal"; and he was not enough delirious in the speech about the sybil and the handkerchief. On the other hand, once yielded to the spell of desecrated feeling, his mood and his expression of it were immeasurably pathetic and noble. Those two great ebullitions of despair, "O, now forever," and "Had it pleased heaven," could not be spoken in a manner more absolutely heart-broken or more beautifully simple than the manner that was used by him. In his obvious though silent suffering at the disgrace and dismissal of Cassio; in the dazed, forlorn agony that blended with his more active passion throughout the scene of Iago's wicked conquest of his credulity; in his occasional quick relapses into blind and sweet fidelity to the old belief in Desdemona; in his unquenchable tenderness for her, through the delirium and the sacrifice; and in the tone of soft, romantic affection--always spiritualised, never sensual--that his