from their approaches. The great scene with Tubal was a revelation of
such originality and of such terrible force as had not probably been
seen upon those boards before. "How the devil so few of them could
kick up such a row was something marvellous!" naïvely remarked
Oxberry. At the end of the third act every one was ready to pay court
to him; but again he held aloof. All his thoughts were concentrated on
the great "trial" scene, which was coming. In that scene the
wonderful variety of his acting completed his triumph. Trembling with
excitement, he resumed his half-dried clothes, and, glad to escape,
rushed home. He was in too great a state of ecstasy at first to speak,
but his face told his wife that he had realized his dream--that he
had appeared on the stage of Drury Lane, and that his great powers
had been instantly acknowledged. With not a shadow of doubt as to his
future, he exclaimed, "Mary, you shall ride in your carriage;" and
taking his baby boy from the cradle and kissing him, said, "and
Charley, my boy, you shall go to Eton,"--and he did.

The time when Edmund Kean made his first appearance in London was
certainly favorable for an actor of genius. For a long while the
national theatre had been in a bad way; and nothing but failure had
hitherto met the efforts of the Committee of Management, a committee
which numbered among its members Lord Byron. When the other members
of the committee, with a strange blindness to their own interests,
proposed that for the present, Kean's name should be removed from
the bills, Byron interested himself on his behalf: "You have a great
genius among you," he said, "and you do not know it." On Kean's second
appearance the house was nearly doubled. Hazlitt's criticism had
roused the whole body of critics, and they were all there to sit in
judgment upon the newcomer. His utter indifference to the audience won
him their respect, and before the piece was half over the sentence