Kynaston was not invariably in such good luck. There was another handsome man, Sir Charles Sedley, whose style of dress the young actor aped; and his presumption was punished by a ruffian, hired by the baronet, who accosted Kynaston in St. James's Park, as "Sir Charles," and thrashed him in that character. The actor then mimicked Sir Charles on the stage. A consequence was, that on the 30th of January 1669,[21] Kynaston was waylaid by three or four assailants, and so clubbed by them, that there was no play on the following evening; and the victim, mightily bruised, was forced to keep his bed. He did not recover in less than a week. On the 9th of February he reappeared, as the King of Tidore, in the "Island Princess," which "he do act very well," says Pepys, "after his beating by Sir Charles Sedley's appointment." The boy who used to play Evadne, and now enacted the tyrants of the drama, retained a certain beauty to the last. "Even at past sixty," Cibber tells us, "his teeth were all sound, white, and even as one would wish to see in a reigning toast of twenty." Colley attributes the formal gravity of Kynaston's mien "to the stately step he had been so early confined to in a female decency." The same writer praises Kynaston's Leon, in "Rule a Wife and have a Wife," for its determined manliness and honest authority. In the heroic tyrants, his piercing eye, his quick, impetuous tone, and the fierce, lion-like majesty of his bearing and utterance, "gave the spectator a kind of trembling admiration." When Cibber played Syphax, in "Cato," he did it as he thought Kynaston would have done, had he been alive to impersonate the character. Kynaston roared through the bombast of some of the dramatists with a laughable earnestness; but in Shakspeare's monarchs he was every inch a king--dignified and natural. The true majesty of his Henry IV. was so manifest, that when he whispered to Hotspur, "Send us your prisoners, or you'll hear of it," he conveyed, says Cibber, "a more terrible menace in it than the loudest intemperance of voice could swell to." Again, in the interview between the dying King and his son--the dignity, majestic grief, the paternal affection, the injured, kingly feeling, the pathos and the justness of the rebuke--were alike remarkable. The actor was equal to the task assigned him by the author--putting forth "that peculiar and becoming grace which the best writer cannot inspire into any actor that is not born with it."