Thomas Betterton. By Robert W. Lowe. (Kegan Paul, Trench, and
Co.)—This volume belongs to the series of "Eminent Actors," following the editor's (Mr. W. Archer's) account of Macready.
There is a certain appropriateness in the sequence, for the two men were alike in the blamelessness of their private character. An actor who could walk unsmirched the stage of the Restoration drama, must have been no common man. Mr. Lowe writes some preliminary chapters on the history of the drama during the Com- monwealth and after the Restoration. His whole book is the result of a careful study of things theatrical. In fact, it is almost overloaded with detail, and we find it difficult to get a clear notion of Betterton himself. The old actor (he was born in 1635) re- mained on the stage till shortly before his death. (His gains were not extravagant ; all told, they could hardly have amounted to .R400 per annum.) In fact, his last performance killed him. He had a benefit on April 16th, 1710. Just before the performance he had a fit of gout, and the remedies which he took, though for the time effectual, drove the complaint to his head. It carried him off on April 28th. Four days afterwards he was buried in the east cloister of Westminster Abbey. Steele described the funeral in the Taller. "I was resolved," he writes, "to walk thither and see the last office done to a man whom I always very much admired, and from whose action I had received more strong impressions of what is great and noble in human nature, than from the arguments of the most solid philosophers, or the descriptions of the most charming poets I had ever read."
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