It is not easy to say in what character Kean plays best. He so fits himself to each in turn, that if the effect he produces at one time is less than at another, it is because of some inferiority in stage-effect in the character. Othello is probably the character best adapted to stage-effect, and Kean has an uninterrupted power over us in playing it. When he commands, we are awed; when his face is sensitive with love and love thrills in his soft tones, all that our imaginations had pictured to us is realized. His jealousy, his hate, his fixed purposes, are terrific and deadly; and the groans wrung from him in his grief have the pathos and anguish of Esau's, when he stood before his old, blind father, and sent up "an exceeding bitter cry." Again, in Richard, how does he hurry forward to his object, sweeping away all between him and it! The world and its affairs are nothing to him, till he gains his end. He is all life, and action, and haste,--he fills every part of the stage, and seems to do all that is done. I have before said that his voice is harsh and breaking in his high tones, in his rage, but that this defect is of little consequence in such places. Nor is it well suited to the more declamatory parts. This, again, is scarce worth considering; for how very little is there of mere declamation in good English plays! But it is one of the finest voices in the world for all the passions and feelings which can be uttered in the middle and lower tones. In Lear,-- "If you have poison for me, I will drink it." And again,-- "You do me wrong to take me out o' the grave. Thou art a soul in bliss." Why should I cite passages? Can any man open upon the scene in which these are contained, without Kean's piteous looks and tones being present to him? And does not the mere remembrance of them, as he reads, bring tears into his eyes? Yet, once more, in Othello,-- "Had it pleased Heaven To try me with affliction," &c. In the passage beginning with "O, now for ever Farewell the tranquil mind,"-- there was "a mysterious confluence of sounds" passing off into infinite distance, and every thought and feeling within him seemed traveling with them. How graceful he is in Othello! It is not a practiced, educated grace, but the "unbought grace" of his genius, uttering itself in its beauty and grandeur in the movements of the outward man. When he says to Iago so touchingly, "Leave me, leave me, Iago," and, turning from him, walks to the back of the stage, raising his hands, and bringing them down upon his head, with clasped fingers, and stands thus with his back to us, there is a grace and majesty in his figure which we look on with admiration.