such as Kean, Kemble, Young, &c., are, as I have elsewhere remarked, men of great cultivation, who have seen the best society, and devoted their lives to the earnest study of their great national poet. They seldom act any other characters than his, and do not mix up a tragic hero with one of Iffland's _Geheimenräthe_ (privy councillors,) nor Talbot with Herr von Langsalm, nor appear to-day in Othello, and to-morrow in Wollmarkt. It strikes one as very singular, that in appearance, and to a great extent in reality, the public before whom these distinguished artists have to present themselves is so rude, ignorant and unmannerly. Yet perhaps this very thing may produce a good effect on them. As the truly virtuous love virtue, so must an English actor love his art,--for its own sake alone,--and trouble himself little about his reception: in the end, he is thus most sure to obtain universal applause. And indeed I must confess that, spite of all this roughness, there is a portion of English audiences which has at bottom sounder taste and sense than the feeble, hyper-refined people of our German metropolitan towns; nay, even among the vulgar crowd there is an invisible church of the initiated, whose existence never suffers the sacred fire in the breast of the actors to be wholly extinguished; it is not very busy in public criticism, but has a mighty effect in society. Many Germans don't like to be told that other nations excel us in any thing: and truly I perceive the fact with great regret: but that must not prevent my speaking out my conviction, that, as we have no dramatic poet of Shakspeare's calibre, so we possess no actor capable of making his characters live before our eyes in their full significancy. It was not always so, as it is asserted; and I myself have retained impressions received in my earliest youth from Fleck and Unzelmann, which have never been renewed in Germany. Schröder and Eckhof seem to have stood yet higher; and I remember with singular pleasure the enthusiastic descriptions given me of them by old Archenholz, who had also seen Garrick. He thought Schröder at least Garrick's equal. That in order to form anything like a correct judgment of foreign actors, we must first in some degree throw ourselves in thought into their nationality;[85] must accustom ourselves to many of their manners and usages, which, like many turns of their language, always affect us as strange, however well we may understand them,--will be admitted by every thinking man. At first, these causes always more or less distract the attention; and I never saw more than one individual who, (if I may use the expression,) had a perfectly cosmopolitan organization,--the perhaps never-equalled, certainly never-surpassed, Miss O'Neil. In her it was only the pure abstract human mind and soul that spoke;--nation, time and external appearance, vanished from the thoughts in an ecstacy which carried all before it. But back to the present.