at all conclusive; indeed, there is one fatal balfpence. If this was not a worthy prepaobjection to Mr. Hawkins's theory. In the ration for an Etonian, it was still less in Eton school lists published by Mr. Stapyl-character with the dignity of the future ton, and ranging over the very time to tragedian. which Edmund Kean's residence in the school is assigned, no such name is to be found. We think Mr. Hawkins should have referred to these lists before relying on what he calls strong circumstantial evidence, and arguing that nothing can be brought against it but the “occasional imperfectness of the tragedian's Latin.” The beginning of Kean's dramatic career, when people wondered who was "that little man in the capes," waiting in the hall at Drury Lane, or when Mrs. Siddons, playing with him at the Belfast Theatre, asked, rose SO Who is that horrid little man?" scarcely lead up to the sudden success he gained on his appearance as Shylock. But from that If there was anything in the tradition time forward he rose from glory to glory. which has thus imposed on the biographer, In almost every part he played he worked a it would at least show a wonderful rise in revolution. The conservatives of the drama Kean's circumstances since his earlier child- objected to his black wig in the part of hood. He was the natural son of a man Shylock, to the quickness of familiar who is alternately described as a tailor, an utterance" with which as Richard III. he architect, and a stage carpenter, and of a pronounced sentence on Hastings, to the woman who was sometimes a strolling player light, gay, and careless air" substituted and sometimes a hawker. The father had for gloom and grimness in the representaabandoned the mother before the child's tion of Iago. But the public was with birth, and three months after his birth the Kean in all these points, and, right or child was deserted in his turn. He was wrong, they were applauded to the echo. picked up in the streets by a poor couple, We have already heard of his reception as and was taken care of by them till his Sir Giles Overreach. When he first acted mother reclaimed him in order to train him Shylock to a thin house, the actors in the for the stage. When three years old he green-room wondered how such a noise figured as Cupid in a ballet at the Opera; could be made by so few people. The he was afterwards a demon in the Drury nightly receipts of the theatre Lane pantomime, and when Kemble brought rapidly that the committee of management out "Macbeth" at the same theatre, Kean, doubled Kean's salary, and gifts, praises, then aged six, appeared as one of the goblin tributes flowed in to him from all quarters. troupe in the scene of the witches' cauldron. Among his finest hits must be ranked the On this occasion he played the manager attitude he assumed in Richard III., when and the rest of the goblins a trick which the action of the play was suspended in "led to the abandonment of what Kemble order that he might stand for a while drawis reported to have termed the finest coming figures on the sand and gazing into mentary on and illustration of Shakespeare vacancy. Of his performance of Luke in ever attempted on the stage." Kean, be- Massinger's "City Madam" it is recorded ing hampered by some irons which had been applied to his limbs as a cure for distortion, made a false step, tripped up his neighbour, and sent the whole troop sprawling. One of the next events in Kean's boyhood is his trial of a sea life. He ran away from home, walked to Portsmouth, and shipped himself as cabin-boy on a vessel bound to Madeira. Of course he was not long in discovering that he had made a change for the worse. To procure his freedom, he affected complete deafness and lameness, keeping up the deception so well that he was sent to hospital in Madeira, and thence back to England. We afterwards hear of sundry other pranks, of continual escapes from the uncle with whom he was staying, of his turning head-over-heels and giving imitations of monkeys and knifegrinders at taverns, and of his being once found tarred and feathered at a public-house where he was tumbling and singing for that an old lady, who had intended leaving him a large sum of money, was so appalled by the cold-blooded villany he displayed, that she transferred the legacy to a distant relation. We will let Mr. Hawkins speak of the crowning effect in Kean's Zanga: "But all was cast into the shade by the unspeakable grandeur of his avowal of the terrible success attendant upon those stratagems which had turned the hydra of calamities — jealousy — to his dire intent: Born for use, I live but to oblige you ; Know then, 'twas I.' the long-smothered hate blazed forth with fearHis eye lit up with a preternatural brilliance; ful intensity; as Alonzo fell he majestically extended his arms over the fainting Spaniard; towering over the prostrate body with terrific energy and power, he trampled upon it in an attitude which Hazlitt regarded as not the less dreadful from its being perfectly beautiful. The as you are." effect was appalling; the fiery soul flashed out ing, but thought itself entitled to make him with a look and gesture which imparted a cor- bow his acknowledgments, Kean said calmly, responding dignity to the body; Rae (Alonzc), Well, I have played in every civilized although the largest man, seemed to wither country, where English is the language of shrink into half his size and appear smaller than the people, but I never acted to an audiKean; and as Barry Cornwall contemplated the dark and exulting Moor standing over his vic-ence of such ignorant, unmitigated brutes tim, with his flashing eyes and arms thrown upwards (as though he would lay open his very heart to view ') he thought that he had never held anything so like the Archangel ruined.' He was recalling to mind the line descriptive of the sail-broad vans' of the great spirit of Milton when, by an extraordinary coincidence of idea, he heard Southey exclaim to a companion, By God! he looks like the Devil.'" Perhaps amidst all his triumphs the most She wrote Edmund Kean." Criticism from such a quarter he took with good grace, and the play disappeared from the bills after two more representations. But it is interesting to contrast with this docility Kean's proper pride and independence when he was bearded by uncultivated audiences. At the Glasgow Theatre he quelled a disturbance by advancing to the footlights and asking, with a contemptuous emphasis, "What are your commands, gentlemen?" In Guernsey he applied to the audience a line from his part, "Unmannered dogs, stand ye when I command!" bitter opposition at various periods of his And yet Kean was doomed to face much life. His early struggles were light compared with the intensity of that in which he was involved by his unhappy intrigue with an alderman's wife. This, and the troubles arising out of it, embittered his closing years, and the curtain which had risen on want and hardship fell upon a more cruel sorrow. From The Spectator, 22 May. CUBA AND THE ALABAMA QUESTION. [FROM OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT.] NEW YORK, May 7, 1869. WHEN Mr. Sumner made his speech upon those reciprocal claims between Great Brithe proposed Treaty for the settlement of tain and the United States, one item of which has been forced into undue prominence, under the name of "The Alabama Claims," by designing and unscrupulous people in this country, he furnished a very good text for a letter to the Spectator. Rather, he would have done so, were it not that the views which he set forth so clearly these columns with some particularity. It and so ably had already been presented in seemed that all necessary comment on that speech could be made in England; and I revert to its subject now only to do what I may toward the correction of some misapprehensions in regard to it, which, judging by the London newspapers, and by public and private correspondence from that quarter, seem to be very prevalent among those for whom they speak. minds that there is anything belligerant in the And first, pray dismiss at once from your purposes or the feelings of this people toward Great Britain. We have had our fill of fighting for at least one generation, and were never less disposed to quarrel with any one than we are at present. So hideous does An apology was demanded, and Kean ex-war seem to us, so destructive have we claimed, Apology! take it from this remark: the only proof of intelligence you have yet given is in the proper application of the words I have just uttered." In like manner, at the Coburg Theatre, being called after the fall of the curtain by an audience which had not appreciated his act found it, so do we groan under the burthens it has laid upon us, that we, never at any time inclined to fight, except upon compulsion (so far have we deteriorated from our English origin), would now put up with almost anything but open insult and great and wanton injury. Nor, as regards our feeling towards the British Government or extorted from a British Court, but not to people, is there any peculiar aggressiveness the comity of nations. I am not prepared or pugnacity in us. Neither are we angry with our brother, although we think that we have a cause. And as to any pettishness, like that of a wife who won't make up, and who won't take the bracelet, to which I was sorry to see the Spectator compare our conduct, trust me, you have sadly mistaken us, if you really think that it is in any such mood that we have rejected Mr. Johnson's Treaty. If, then, we are not belligerent, or angry, or even sulky, in what state are we, and what is the matter? This: we are hurt. No wound of petty vanity stings us into petulance; but a deep, grave consciousness of great offence; offence the greatest that can be given by one nation to another; offence given with what is worse than deliberate intention, absolute indifference. The people of the United States have a rooted consciousness that the British Government and the governing classes of the British people seized with eager haste the time of our trial, the hour of our peril, to show us that they set at naught our title to the consideration due to a people having a recognized place among civilized nations; that in their opinion it was a very small matter, even as far as we were concerned, whether our Government was extinguished, and as concerned other nations, and particularly the British, it was rather to be desired that we should, as a power and a unit in the world, be blotted out of existence; and that this feeling of mingled contempt and hatred found its fittest and most perfect expression in the circumstances which attended the building, the sailing, and the career of the crusier which, under the protection of belligerent rights originally granted with indecent haste, drove our commerce from the ocean. Mr. Sumner put the case well in speaking for his countrymen when he said that the injury this nation had received was in its sovereignty. The London Times is reported by telegraph as having said yesterday that "the question is one of law, and not of feeling." Were this true, the question might be easily settled. Law cannot give damages for wounded sensibilities, does not, except in the case of a woman whose tender heart has been so lacerated by the contemplation of wedding garments bought or planned in vain, that she is inconsolable except by handsome damages paid down in money. But the question is not one of law, but of comity. The very edge of this grievance that cuts so deep into the quick is the dealing with us on the assumption that we were entitled to just as much legal protection as could be to say that if I had been born and bred in England I should not have rivalled Mr. Roebuck in my contempt of the Americans," Mr. Laird, in my willingness to make money out of their calamity, or Earl Russell in my lofty indifference as to the fate of such political inverteberates, any more than I am prepared to say that if I had been born and bred in South Carolina I should not have been fighting under Lee instead of writing under Lincoln. But had I taken the position which was completely shown in the action of the Earl and the two members of Parliament, I should have expected the feeling aroused by it to be less easily obliterated than that consequent upon an open defiance and a long and bloody war. Whether this hurt can be healed in the presrent generation, even by a confession of wrong on the part of Great Britain and an offer of reparation based upon that acknowledgment, seems to me, I confess, somewhat more than doubtful. Nor can I rate very high the emollient effect of the present change of tone in England toward America and the Americans," the disposition to laud and magnify what before was scoffed at and belittled, and to cover over all that grated so sorely with a varnish of smoothness. For the most unthinking man of us must see that this change is due merely to the fact that we have shown that we are strong. We know that we are now really less worthy of respect than we were fifty years ago. At a time when our Government was administered by statesmen, men of ability, of dignity, of culture, when our Courts gave opinions which are still quoted with respect by British judges, when our public life was pure and honourable, and as à people, we had a higher moral tone and a more general diffusion of intelligence and education than could be found in any other country in the world, we did not receive the consideration which is now awarded us, when statesmanship and purity are almost equally rare among our public men; when our Courts have sunk so low that they have little authority even among ourselves; and when our society is debauched with sensualism and debased by the gross and open worship of mammon. And why? Simply because we have shown that we can put 500,000 men into the field, and pay 6 per cent, on three thousand millions of dollars. Jonathan may be a raw lad, but he is not so dull that he cannot understand such a sudden change as this, and rate it very near to its exact value. It is somewhat like the change of tone toward President Lincoln Government upon this point. Orders have been given, I know, which will ensure the observation of all our obligations to Spain, and the Spanish Minister has yet found no ground of complaint. Why, for months the rebels have kept the field in Cuba, for months Spain has been sending troops and ships to put down the rebellion, and the Captain-General has recognized its armed existence, and proclaimed now death and now a general amnesty, and yet, although the rebellion is at our very doors, we have not recognized the Cubans as belligerents. A resolution of the House of Representatives ! I wonder, and am a little ashamed, that sen after his death, which had its fullest utter- the how and the when of her fitting-out and ance in Punch's penitential psalm. But her departure. No vessel intended to then, even those of us who thought that cruise against Spanish commerce will lie for there might have been a wiser, stronger, months in our docks and at our wharves, her fitter leader than he in the battle for those destination known to the world, and pointed principles that he expressed with such no-out to our Government by a remonstrating ble simplicity of language at the burial- Spanish Minister, and then go to sea unhinground of Gettysburg, asked ourselves dered, and burn, and sink, and refit in our What, must a President of the United States harbours, and sink and burn again for a be assassinated before he can be spoken of twelvemonth and more, unpursued. Should by the people who rule in England with the there be such a vessel, with such a career, our respect due to the head of a great nation? mouths will be closed for ever, or at least, There is very little anxiety here on this until we have owned our wrong-doing, and question of the Alabama claims. The Brit- made all the restitution in our power. But ish Foreign Office need not fear that it will there will be no such vessel, unless a great be vexed by Mr. Motley for their settle-change takes place in the intentions of our ment. And Mr. Reverdy Johnson, an able man and an upright, comes home under a cloud, not because of his failure to arrange a treaty, but because like many other able and upright men, he has shown a lack of social tact and wisdom. This sad entanglement will not be cut by war; it will be disentangled in the end, though how or when I shall not venture to predict. - only to hope that it will be with honour to both nations. Pending this question, we ourselves are placed in a delicate position toward a power with which we are at peace, and our conduct toward which may be, with some reason, set up as a standard according to which we must limit our demands on others. Al-sible London journalists should seem to set ready we are taunted by leading London journals with our sympathy for the rebellion in Cuba, and asked if British obligations to us were greater than ours are to Spain. Not a whit. And if we do not keep all our treaty obligations to Spain, - and more, if we disregard toward her the comity of nations, - she will have ground of complaint against us the same in kind as that we have against Great Britain, and in degree like it, according to the nature of the insult and the extent of the injury consequent upon our action. We owe to Spain exactly the same respect for treaties and the same comity that we owed to Great Britain when, after the career of the Alabama was closed, through no help or encouragement of our mother and ally, the Fenians attempted to make our soil the base of their operations against Canada; and as we observed that obligation, notwithstanding the pleas that were urged for its non-observance, so we shall keep this, regardless of any temptation to the contrary. A few men and a few guns may leave our shores for Cuba, but it will be because they are sent so secretly that the Government knows nothing of their preparation, and that even the Press will not agree as to whether the vessel is the Arago or the Peril, or as to Cuba anything by words spoken in that great a rebellion and that against one in which the A YANKEE. From The Spectator, 22 May. THE LATEST PHASE OF THE AMERICAN TROUBLE. 66 tice at last." The Evening Post, most moderate of Republican papers, declares that America will no more consent to arbitration on the matter of the Alabama than a man robbed by a pickpocket would arbitrate as to his right to punish. Our own correspondent, by no means a strong partizan, less of a Republican in sympathy, as he often says, than the Spectator is, distinctly bases during the war, on Mr. Roebuck's conhis claim on the attitude of our people THE effect of Mr. Sumner's speech is Russell's lofty indifference to the fate of tempt, and Mr. Laird's greed, and Earl dying away both in this country and in such " America, after costing the two countries, he says, and he says quite truly, it is the political invertebrates." America, it is believed, some thirty millions sterling, precise point we have been hammering at - but the "improved" phase of affairs is all through the controversy, anything but satisfactory. The chances of sive, not angry, not pettish, not anything is not aggresa war to arise immediately out of American but sorely hurt." By what conceivable demands are, no doubt, diminished; but contrivance of diplomacy are we to help the reconciliation so essential to the inter- that? Suppose we put all ideas about ests of both nations, and, as we think, to honour and position and consistency and the progress of the world, seems further off truthfulness into our pockets, and formally than ever. It is impossible to read any acknowledge a lie, declare, say by Act of communication from the United States with- Parliament, that we were dreadfully in the out perceiving that Mr. Sumner expressed wrong in acknowledging the belligerency with precise accuracy the feeling of his peo- of the South, and consequently surrender ple, without seeing that the real grievance, British America as damages, how would the "wrong" about which they care, the that mend matters ? injury they hope yet to avenge, is one for that a majority of the British governing It would still be true which there can be no reparation, which class did detest the North, perceiving is beyond the pale, not only of ordinary instinctively that the North was in the vandiplomacy, but of any negotiation, how-guard of the war against privilege, - that ever informal or however elastic. It is not many statesmen, including Lord Palmersan act, but an attitude of mind, not the re- ton, but not including Earl Russell, wished lease of the Alabama, but the "unfriendli- the Union broken up as a power too strong of the British people, for which the for the freedom of mankind, that half the Americans desire, and will, they threaten, English middle-class were one day demand satisfaction. No one can erroneous intelligence into a similar temper. deceived by read the American journals, or the letter If that is the root of bitterness, no act of our able correspondent "A Yankee," however unusual, no apology however or the explanations attributed to Mr. Sum- abject, no concession however cowardly, ner, or any one of the hundred communi- can possibly remove it; for the American cations which reach England, without being demand is that we should do the one thing satisfied that this, and not any legal point which transcends the power of Omnipowhatever, is the very essence of the dispute. tence, should cancel the transacted past. Mr. Sumner, in his conversation with the We might forget it, just as the Americans reporter of the New York Herald, states have forgotten that the Government which that his speech expresses the views of the they consider so unfriendly, the statesmen President, of the Senate, and of the whole whom they so hate, the people from whom people; that the dislike of Mr. Reverdy they so acrimoniously demand justice, lent Johnson had nothing to do with the rejec- them millions, sent them supplies without tion of the Alabama Treaty, for he negoti- limit, suffered 40,000 of their children to ated the Naturalization Treaty also, which was ratified by an unanimous vote, and repeats that payment for the losses caused by the Alabama is " nothing to the point." The English must look at the matter as the Americans do, and consider that they have battered down the seaboard cities of the Union. The American people ask nothing but what is fair, and mean to have jus ness enter their army, and, finally, risked their greatest alliance in Europe in order to save the Union. In the very crisis of the struggle they prevented the march of a hundred thousand French soldiers through Texas to the assistance of the South. We may forget as they have done, but how it is possible to repair a state of feeling save as we are doing, by admitting on every possible |