felicitous; but his picturesqueness, on the whole, strikes me as dry and awkward, and, at the best, where certain essentials are so strikingly absent, these secondary devices lose much of their power. Mr. Fechter in Hamlet was preponderantly a "picturesque" actor; but he had a certain sacred spark, a heat, a lightness and suppleness, which Mr. Irving lacks; and though, with his incurable foreign accent, he could hardly be said to _declaim_ Shakespeare in any worthy sense, yet on the whole he spoke his part with much more of the positively agreeable than can possibly belong to the utterance of Mr. Irving. His speech, with all its fantastic Gallicisms of sound, was less foreign and more comprehensible than that strange tissue of arbitrary pronunciations which floats in the thankless medium of Mr. Irving's harsh, monotonous voice. Richard III. is of all Shakespeare's parts the one that can perhaps best dispense with declamation, and in which the clever inventions of manner and movement in which Mr. Irving is proficient will carry the actor furthest. Accordingly, I doubt not, Mr. Irving is seen to peculiar advantage in this play; it is certainly a much better fit for him than Macbeth. He has had the good taste to discard the vulgar adaptation of Cibber, by which the stage has so long been haunted, and which, I believe, is played in America to the complete exclusion of the original drama. I believe that some of the tenderest Shakespearians refuse to admit the authenticity of "Richard III."; they declare that the play has, with all its energy, a sort of intellectual grossness, of which the author of "Hamlet" and "Othello" was incapable. This same intellectual grossness is certainly very striking; the scene of Richard's wooing of Lady Ann is a capital specimen of it. But here and there occur passages which, when one hears the play acted, have all the vast Shakespearian sense of effect. ----To hear the piteous moans that Edward made When black-faced Clifford shook his sword at him. It is hard to believe that Shakespeare did not write that. And when Richard, after putting an end to Clarence, comes into Edward IV.'s presence, with the courtiers ranged about, and announces hypocritically that Providence has seen fit to remove him, the situation is marked by one or two speeches which are dramatic as Shakespeare alone is dramatic. The immediate exclamation of the Queen-- All-seeing heaven, what a world is this! --followed by that of one of the gentlemen-- Look _I_ so pale, Lord Dorset, as the rest?