With a short interval John Kemble was manager of Drury Lane till 1801.[69] In the following year he went abroad, the affairs of Drury having fallen into confusion; and in 1803, having purchased a sixth share of Covent Garden, he succeeded Lewis in the management of that theatre, and remained there till his retirement in 1817, at the close of the season in which Mr. Macready made his first appearance in London, as Orestes; and Lucius Junius Booth, as Richard, flashed promise for a moment and straightway died out. With Kemble's departure from Drury Lane closes the first part of his career. He had begun it with £5 per week, and ended it with a weekly salary strangely reckoned of £56, 14s. He had borne himself well throughout. He had a lofty scorn of anonymous assailants; was solemn enough in his manners not to give a guinea, for drink, to the theatrical guard, without stupendous phrases; but he could stoop to "knuckle down" at marbles with young players on the highway; and to utter jokes to them with a Cervantic sort of gravity. He addressed noisy and unappreciative audiences with such neat satire that they thought he was apologising, when he was really exposing their stupidity. I do not know if he were generous in criticism of his fellow actors; he said of Cooke's Sir Pertinax, that comedy had nothing like it. This had been called "liberal;" but it looks to me satirical; and he certainly never praised Cooke's tragedy. The utmost, indeed, he ever said of Kean was, that "the gentleman was terribly in earnest." On the other hand, his own worshippers nearly choked him with incense. Boaden may not have been far wrong when he said that Kemble was at the head of the Academics, but he certainly was so in describing Cooke as merely at the head of the vulgar; and he approached blasphemy when he tells us that Kemble's features and figure as the Monk in "Aurelio and Miranda" reminded him, and could only be compared with, those of ONE, to name WHOM would be irreverent! Kemble's secret of success lay in his indefatigable assiduity. In studying the part of the Stranger he neglected for weeks, that for which he was particularly distinguished,--neatness of costume. Whatever the part he had to play, he acted it as if it were the most important in the piece; and, like Betterton, Booth, Quin, Barry, and Garrick, he made his impersonation of the Ghost[70] as distinct a piece of art as Hamlet, when that character fell to him, in its turn. Even in Earl Percy, in the "Castle Spectre," an inferior character, he took such pains as nearly to break his neck, and in the scene of the attempted escape, fell back, from the high window to which he had climbed, to the sofa below, from which he had painfully ascended, with the agility and precision of a harlequin.