"After one of those catastrophes to which I have alluded, I paid him a visit at early afternoon, the better to secure his attendance at the theatre. He was seated at his table, with many decanters, all exhausted, save two or three appropriated for candlesticks, the lights in full blaze. He had not rested for some thirty hours or more. With much ado, aided by Price the manager, he was persuaded to enter the carriage waiting at the door to take him to the playhouse. It was a stormy night. He repaired to the green-room, and was soon ready. Price saw he was the worse from excess, but the public were not to be disappointed. 'Let him,' says the manager, 'only get before the lights and the receipts are secure.' Within the wonted time Cooke entered on his part, the Duke of Gloster. The public were unanimous in their decision, that he never performed with greater satisfaction. As he left the house he whispered, 'Have I not pleased the Yankee-doodles?' Hardly twenty-four hours after this memorable night, he scattered some 400 dollars among the needy and the solicitous, and took refreshment in a sound sleep. A striking peculiarity often marked the conduct of Cooke: he was the most indifferent of mortals to the results which might be attendant on his folly and his recklessness. When his society was solicited by the highest in literature and the arts, he might determine to while away a limited leisure among the illiterate and the vulgar, and yet none was so fastidious in the demands of courtesy. When the painter Stuart was engaged with the delineation of his noble features, he chose to select those hours for sleeping; yet the great artist triumphed and satisfied his liberal patron, Price. Stuart proved a match for him, by occasionally raising the lid of his eye. On the night of his benefit, the most memorable of his career in New York, with a house crowded to suffocation, he abused public confidence, and had nothing to say but that Cato had full right to take liberty with his senate." In this strange being, there are two phases of character that are beyond ordinary singularity. The first was his "mental intoxication," of which he thus speaks in one of his journals: "To use a strange expression, I am sometimes in a kind of mental intoxication; some, I believe, would call it insanity. I believe it is allied to it. I then can imagine myself in strange situations and strange places. This humour, whatever it is, comes uninvited, but it is nevertheless easily dispelled,--at least, generally so. When it _cannot_ be dispelled, it must, of course, become madness." Here was a decided perception of the way he might be going,--from physical, through mental, intoxication, to the madhouse!