talents to find their proper levels. His first appearance was in Hamlet, in which he received unbounded applause. In two or three nights after he performed the very arduous part of Macbeth to a house so very full as to occasion an overflow. It is but justice to the Edinburgh and other provincial managers to observe, that when Mr. Cooper appeared on the London boards he was greatly improved in his externals. His person had grown more into masculine bulk and manly shape; his face had become more marked and expressive, and his voice had swelled into a more full deep tenor. The friendship of Mr. Holcroft caused Mr. Cooper to be universally misjudged. The opposition prints represented him in the most extravagant terms of eulogy. The government prints ran into the opposite extreme, and he became at once the idol and the victim of party spirit. Yet such a reception, by a London audience, was a sufficient pledge of future success. He was still young, had much to learn in order to reach the first rank of that profession, and if a real, well-grounded, just fame had been his object, he ought to have felt that it could only be attained by perseverance, and by the customary natural gradations. The London managers offered him an engagement, which, though allowed to have been liberal, seems not to have come up to his own estimate of his deserts. Playing two or three or four characters well is a very different thing from sustaining a whole line of acting, to which long practice and great constitutional force are as necessary as any other requisite. In this view of the matter, as well as because managers neither desire nor will be permitted in England to supersede established favourite servants of the public, it will not appear surprising that the first rate rank of characters to which Mr. Cooper aspired, was refused to him by the managers, who thought that they better consulted the public feeling, their own interest, and even the young gentleman's fame and ultimate prosperity, by placing him in a secondary general line, in which he might improve himself by playing with and observing the best models, and in regular gradation make his way to the first, as Kemble, Cooke, and others had done before him. This however was too unpalatable for his ambition to swallow. The first he would be, or none. There is not a sentiment of Julius Caesar's that is thought so censurable and unworthy of his great mind as that which he uttered when, pointing to a small town, he said, "I would rather be the first man in that village than the second in Rome." This has been justly called perverted ambition, and Milton stamped it with terrible condemnation when he put into the mouth of his arch fiend the sentiment--"better to reign in hell than serve in heaven." The passions of youth extenuate those errors which in ripened manhood are criminal; and it is not improbable that Mr. Cooper's own opinion at this day concurs with ours when we say that his