English ears; but, in spite of this, he played a series of brilliant engagements. By the aid of Lady Burdett-Coutts, always an admirer of the drama and now the moneyed partner of Mr. Henry Irving in the management of the same theater, M. Fechter was enabled, in 1863, to take the Lyceum Theater, which he managed for four years, acting in " Ruy Blas," "Don César de Bazan," ," "The Duke's Motto," and in other plays of the same class, besides attempting Hamlet and Othello. In all of these his French intonation was against him, and it was to give him a part in which this would not be a disadvantage that his friends, Charles Dickens and Mr. Wilkie Collins, wrote the Christmas story of "No Thoroughfare," and then turned it into a play, in which Fechter created Obenreizer. To act in the French version of "No Thoroughfare," called "L'Abime," M. Fechter returned to Paris for a while in 1868.

Ten years after his first success in England, Fechter came to the United States, preceded by an extravagant eulogy sent to the "Atlantic Monthly by Dickens a eulogy which was very dangerous and, in fact, very injurious to the French actor, for it excited anticipations so high that David Garrick himself could not have satisfied them. Appearing first, January 10th, 1870, at Niblo's Garden in this city, he afterward managed the Globe Theater in Boston and the Lyceum in New York. Successful as an actor until of late years, when he began to be careless and to disappoint audiences by sudden attacks of indisposition, the one thing certain to alienate the mass of theater-goers,—as a manager he never succeeded; his arrogant temper and his lack of judgment resulted in lowering all interest in him until neither his fellowplayers nor the public could be induced to work together with him.

Latterly, Fechter's powers of acting were on the wane, owing partly to weakening health, and his death was not felt as a great loss to the stage, on which he had ceased to be prominent some time before. His career presents a most unfortunate instance of strong native ability wasted by want of character and lack of self-control. About his acting there was always much discussion, both in this country and in England. He was essentially an actor of situation-that is to say, of melodrama, with but little feeling for character and with no appreciation at all of the serene calm of true poetry. His

ingenuity was quick and fertile in picturesque contrasts and in stage surprises. He was fond of innovation for its own sake, and prided himself on discarding tradition-forgetful, apparently, that on the stage, tradition, as the result of the accumulated skill of the actors of the past, has nine chances in ten of being right. His peculiar ability, great but not of the greatest, was seen to the full in his Hamlet, which was an exceedingly effective picture of a clever young Frenchman of the days of the romantic revival of 1830, unfortunately placed in the same series of situations as Shakspere's Hamlet. That he wore a blonde wig may be taken as typical. No actor has ever entirely failed as Hamlet; the play is so truly dramatic, so well suited to the taste of all playgoers, high and low, that it carries the player along with it. But on Othello Fechter made shipwreck, as David Garrick, the greatest of all actors, had done before him; in that rich tragic part no effort of ingenious picturesqueness could save him from a dismal and instructive failure, just as he had failed years before when he attempted, at the Paris Odéon, the same innovating and modern redressing of Molière's masterpiece, "Tartuffe," a play which lent itself even less readily than "Othello" to this nineteenth-century search for novelty.

Fechter had a great fancy for the purely pictorial play, rich in scenic adornment and lively with well-planned groupings. He was fond of the externals of the stage, and under his management the eye, at least, was certain to be satisfied. Mrs. Kemble justly said of "The Duke's Motto" that "with all its resources of scenic effect" it was "a striking and interesting theatrical entertainment, with hardly an admixture of that which is truly dramatic." Not only in his choice of plays and in his mounting of them as a manager was Fechter's way of looking at things pictorial and plastic rather than really dramatic, but as an actor he always remembered that he had been a sculptor, and his first calling undoubtedly suggested to him some of his happiest effects. Often he summed up a situation by a striking attitude, fitting the gesture to the word with unforgetable effect. Who having ever seen him as Ruy Blas could not but remember the supreme moment, in the last act, when he turns on Don Sallust with the words, "Once I was your lackey-but now I am your executioner!" saying which, he drew his sword and lifted his foot on the chair before

to it, like a tail to a kite. In but a little while Fechter will fade out of men's recollections; he will fill only his allotted space in the biographical dictionaries, and a cloud of anecdotes about him, more or less apocryphal, will float about through the papers. One hesitates before setting another anecdote in circulation, but as it has not hitherto been in print in this country, and as it shows to advantage the actor's quick wit in an emergency, space may perhaps be found for it. He was playing in a heavy melodrama called "Le Fils de la Nuit," in which the great effect was the crossing of a ship in full sail over the stage, repre

him, and the illusions of the stage were about to give way, when Fechter shouted, "Man overboard!" and reaching out over the waters, as the ship sped on its way, he seized the urchin by the shoulder and lifted him over the bulwark into the vessel.

In 1873 there came to this country the foremost of Italian actors, Signor Tommaso Salvini. He first appeared at the New York Academy of Music, on September 16th, 1873, acting Othello. He remained in the United States until April, 1874, when he went to Havana, returning here in June. At Booth's Theater, on the 17th of June, he acted King Saul, which Mr. William Winter considers

senting the wide ocean. The agitation of the waves is generally figured in the theater by a large blue-and-white cloth, which covers the whole stage, and under which an assorted dozen of small boys keep in constant motion to give the cloth the ceaseless movement of the ocean. The piece was a great success and had a long run, and in course of time the sea-cloth began to show signs of wear. One night, as the ship came gliding across the stage, with Fechter, as its captain, standing in the prow, the cloth parted, and there, in the midst of the watery waste, stood a small boy. The eyes of the audience were upon

his greatest work. After visiting the other cities of the country, he returned here in December, leaving New York for Cuba in January. Mr. Winter has kindly furnished me with a few facts and figures of his wanderings in America, which are not without interest in showing that there was throughout the chief towns of the United States a culture capable of appreciating a great artist, even though his subtle graces were seen through the veil of a foreign idiom. Briefly, these figures are to the effect that Signor Salvini acted in all in North America, including Cuba, one hundred and fifty-six times. The gross receipts were about one hundred and fifty thousand dol