POOR KEAN!
KEAN tried to play Henry the Fi.1111 on Monday, and failed com- pletely. The audience—or a part of the audience, sufficiently vocife- rous to pass for the whole—refused at last to listen, and the hero of the evening was forced to throw himself upon their mercy. " Time and circumstances," he said, had made ravages upon his mind : he could only appeal to their liberality as his "countrymen." This address did something for him—but the curtain fell upon the wrath of his opponents. It wss melancholy to witness a man of genius, whom the world has conspired to spoil, struggling with preamture decay, and finally yielding up his honours on the field where they were achieved. True, he long since touched the highest point of all his neatness, and every one saw that he was hastening to his setting ; still, to witness his total eclipse, must have excited emotions of pain in the breasts even of those who never owned him as their idol.
It has been said in extenuation of his failure, that the house was unfeeling, and that the play was a had one. We are not sure that actors have a right to expect extreme delicacy from their audiences ; nor do we think that KEAN underwent deeper humiliation than any other servant of the public would have experienced in similar circumstances. We cannot, moreover, persuade ourselves that SHAKSPE ARE was at all to blame for the catastrophe. Several papers have pronounced Henry the Fifth a part which any actor could fill ; and the Globe has discovered that the whole play is vitiated by inter- polations. It might puzzle, perhaps, the ingenious critic of the Globe to specify these interpolations ; and after all that can honestly be said in disparagement of Henry the Fifth, it will stand at an immeasurable height above Richard the Third. But in truth, KEAN, in his best days, never could have done justice to Hemy of Agincourt. There never was anything chivalrous or philosophic about him. Passion —rapid, changing passion—was his element. Out of that he was but an ordinary being,-
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