Sandford and Smith were two actors whose names constantly recur together, but whose merits were not all of the same degree. The tall, handsome, manly Smith, frequently played Banquo; when his ghost, in the same tragedy, was represented by the short, spare, drolly ill-featured, and undignified Sandford! The latter was famous for his villains--from those of tragedy to ordinary stage ruffians in broad belt and black wig--permanent type of those wicked people in melodramas to this day. This idiosyncrasy amusingly puzzled Charles II., who, in supposed allusion to Shaftesbury, declared that the greatest villain of his time was fair-haired. The public of his period were so accustomed to see Sandford represent the malignant heroes, that when they once saw him as an honest man, who did not prove to be a crafty knave before the end of the fifth act, they hissed the piece out of sheer vexation. Sandford rendered villainy odious by his forcible representation of it. By a look, he could win the attention of an audience "to whatever he judged worth more than their ordinary notice;" and by attending to the punctuation of a passage, he divested it of the jingle of rhyme, or the measured monotony of blank verse. So misshapen, harsh, fierce, yet craftily gentle and knavishly persuasive could Sandford render himself, Cibber believes that Shakspeare, conscious of other qualities in him, would have chosen him to represent Richard, had poet and player been contemporaneous. The generous Colley adds, that if there was anything good in his own Richard, it was because he had modelled it after the fashion in which he thought Sandford would have represented that monarch. Sandford withdrew from the stage, after thirty-seven years' service, commencing in 1661 and terminating in 1698. The career of his more celebrated colleague, Smith, extended only from 1663 to 1696, and that with the interruption of several years when his strong Toryism made him unacceptable to the prejudiced Whig audiences of the early part of the reign of William.[38] He originally represented Sir Fopling Flutter (1676), and Pierre (1682); Chamont (1680), in "The Orphan," and Scandal (1695), in "Love for Love." In the following year he died in harness. The long part of Cyaxares, in "Cyrus the Great," overtaxed his strength, and on the fourth representation of that wearisome tragedy, Smith was taken ill, and died.