Over his remains, in Richmond churchyard, a plain tablet arrests the eye. I never look at it without a crowd of memories of the old and brilliant scene he for awhile adorned, nor without thinking of the words of Lesingham, in the Elizabethan drama:-- "Oh! what our wills will do, With over-rash and headlong peevishness, To bring our calm discretion to repentance!" EPILOGUE. I leave the history of the great players who rivalled or succeeded Edmund Kean, to other chroniclers. They belong--the _great_ players--to a vocation which is next in dignity to that of the poet. In the far off Ionian Islands, Demodocus first inspired his countrymen with that taste for dramatic representation which has overrun the world. Five centuries later, Thespis invented tragedy; and after seven centuries more had elapsed, and there was a new dispensation upon earth, and heathenism was fiercely fighting out its last struggle with Christianity, the stage yielded two of the noblest martyrs to the faith, in the persons of the then renowned actors,--Genesius of Rome, and Gelasinus of Heliopolis. Looking, recently, at the old patent granted by Charles II. to Killigrew and Davenant (now in Drury Lane Theatre), I could not help remarking, that the parchment for which so many hundreds of thousands of pounds had been given, was now virtually worthless, save for the superb portrait of Charles, within the gigantic initial letter of his name. When that patent for two theatres was granted, London was less populous than Manchester is now; and as the population increased, theatres (beginning with that in Goodman's Fields) sprung up in spite of the patent or Lord Chamberlain. The latter granted licenses to a few, with great restrictions. At the Lyceum, for instance, not even a tragedy could be produced unless there were at least five songs or concerted pieces in each act; and the tragedy even then must be called a _burletta_. The licenser's powers did not extend to St. George's Fields, where political plays forbidden on the Middlesex side of the river were attractive merely because they were forbidden.