Apollo must have differed from the rustic companions with whom he fed his flocks upon the plains of Thessaly.

His Macbeth was equal in finish to his best pieces of acting. In the murder scene he was more frozen with terror, more bewildered, and less noisy, than his successors in the part. "Wake Duncan with thy knocking! would thou could'st!" he uttered in the piercing accents of despair. At the banquet, on the vanishing of the ghost, he exclaimed, "So, being gone, I am a man again,” like one who had really been delivered suddenly from some intolerable burden that weighed down his very soul. In the recitation of "to-morrow and to-morrow," &c., his voice sounded like a soft and melancholy music; and his horror on hearing that Birnam wood was on its way to Dunsinane -the vain effort of his terror-palsied arm to draw his sword and stab the bearer of such dreadful tidings-and his tremulous tones when he recovered the use of speechall showed the consummate artist. Perhaps, towards the end of the tragedy, he was somewhat deficient in that martial ardour which burns in the bosom of the usurping tyrant.

But we must bring this lengthy paper to its conclusion, without making mention of several other parts which our favourite occasionally played.

Such, however, were the chief performances of John Philip Kemble-at least, such did they appear to our young enthusiasm, and such are the recollections of them which we have treasured up, that in years to come they may often (to use Wordsworth's lovely language)

Flash upon that inward eye,

Which is the bliss of solitude.

But we are aware how inadequate any description is to give a correct idea of their beauty to those who have

never seen them. The poet, and the painter, when themselves have passed away, yet leave behind enduring monuments of their genius; but the lot of the actor is less fortunate; his finest performances, which have required the labour of half a life to bring them to perfection, are, after all, but "a bodiless creation," and when he has joined the Roscii of other days, have no longer an existence, save in the memories of those who witnessed them. D.

ON BUTTS.

LAUGHTER has been resolved into a triumph of the understanding at some supposed inferiority, and hence may be accounted for the custom of all ages to choose Butts among persons a little lower than themselves, in order to provoke laughter. Again, it has been argued, in order to place this faculty in a more noble and less egotistical light, that laughter is a peculiar faculty distinguishing men from brutes; that it is the source of satire; and that the organs and means of exhibiting ridicule are thus, par éminence, supplied to an intellectual being, for the purpose of checking the growth of folly by humiliating it, and correcting vice, by precluding its tendency to aberrate from the right line of decorum, taste, and morality. In this way, Thespis and the Saturnalian mountebanks of Rome, who used to act upon that moveable stage which preceded regular comedy, laughed folly out of countenance, while they provoked laughter at their wild grimaces, their personal jokes, and their faces besmeared with wine lees, and flour. But these things (chiefly pleased because they gratified the self-elating propensities of the mob. And

here lies the distinction between a buffoon and a man of wit; that you laugh at the first, as well as with him, because he exposes some oddity, or infirmity, or absurdity in his own character, while exposing others; while you laugh with the man of genuine wit, at the exposure of incoherency or imbecility in others from which he is himself free. Thus you laugh with Hogarth at the absurdities of the Academicians of his time; with Pope, at the follies of his Dunciad heroes; but you laugh at Shakspeare's stipendiary fools,ay, even at the inimitable Falstaff himself—as well as those they ridicule. Now, to create laughter of both sorts, both at and with, to gratify the self-elating propensity in the most unmixed degree, constitutes the highest genius in the class of Butts.

In the dark ages, every man of rank considered a jester as a necessary appendage of his establishment; and if we may judge from Will Somers, who was a perfect specimen of the class, a most interesting race of mortals they were. Since then," the sons of little men" have succeeded; and it would seem as if some of "Nature's journeymen had made" Tom fools and buffoons, they imitate their glorious predecessors "so abominably." Certain it is the race is now nearly extinct, the only remaining branch of this tree of "LIFE" being the Joe Grimaldis, pantomime clowns, Mister Merrymen, et id genus omne, if we except a sprinkling of a few cousins-german, who exhibit their astonishing powers of grimace "like angel visits, few and far between," through the medium of a horsecollar at country fairs. But, alas! how transitory are the highest efforts of human genius:

Eheu! fugaces, Posthume, Posthume
Labuntur anni.

"Death's certain," as Justice Shallow says: "see, Sir,

they drew a good bow, and are dead; they shot a fine shoot." Even this laughter-creating tribe are on the eve of extinction. See what the cheap education schools produce! Even their immemorially delighted spectators, the country-bumpkins, are getting too refined. The more enlightened rustics begin to consider such sports too "low;" and hence the professors themselves become indifferent to the care of keeping their grinning instruments in full training and unction, on finding themselves unable to produce the raptures that their fathers did, both from circumscription of joy in themselves, and indifference in their patrons.

Courts and great houses have by no means been exclusive in possessing their set fools. While the feudal potentates in former times had their men in motley to enliven their festal boards "above the salt," the dependant classes had always their established village jokers at the favourite ale-house. Even now-a-day it will be found that no society, however rude, vulgar, and uninformed, is without its established Butt or Butts, videlicet, some person or persons more rude, vulgar, and uninformed than themselves. They all seek to gratify that secret elation of heart at inferiority, which Mr. Hobbes has assigned as the cause of laughter. But in order to produce this favourable self-opinion by means of foil or contrast, in proportion as one man, or one class, becomes more refined than another, they choose their Tom Fools out of a lower or higher class of mankind. Thus, those who cannot relish a horsecollar grimace, will feel great self-elation at being enabled to make an April fool, and chuckle with very fat-creating and self-profitable mirth at smock-races and donkey-races; or on seeing individuals hunting pigs with soaped tails, or mounting slippery poles,

With constant eye and hand,

Still fixed upon the juicy leg of mutton.

Ascend a little higher in the social scale, and you will still find the same love of superiority gratifying itself by some imaginary or real infirmity. Even at the tables of the middling gentry, persons may often be found performing, under the name of Butts, for the sake of a good dinner and a bottle of wine, the same office which the old state-jester did for a more regular stipend; and very frequently on these occasions it does not require any extraordinary wit or discrimination to discover, that the Butt is a less ridiculous or ignorant personage than the individual who engages him to flatter his superiority. But it is a difficult thing, as Horace says, to play the fool well; and these half-stipendiary fools would ruin all, if they allowed their patron to imagine for a moment that he was their inferior. The higher class of Butt, indeed, must be of a superior character; like Falstaff, he must "not only be witty himself, but the cause of wit in others;" he must perform the part of toad-eater, or of fig-eater, (sycophant,) as the Athenians called his office, with address. "If his lordship is disposed to be axiomatical, and to say that Rhenish is not Champagne, he must not dispute the datum, but swallow his lordship's opinion and Rhenish at the same time. If the Honourable Miss his daughter,

venture to assert that Shakspeare neither wrote Chaucer nor Massinger, he must confess that her assertion has staggered an opinion he previously held." When his lordship laughs, he must always be ready to laugh in tune and time-when he is dull, the Butt must, like honest Jack, "devise matter enough to keep him in continual laughter, the wearing out of six fashions." He must let the guests