him an almost sublime look of wonder, passing over the scene and people
around him, and settling apparently somewhere beyond the moon. What he
believed in, improbable as it was to mere terrestrial visions, you at once
conceived to be quite possible,--to be true. The sceptical idiots of the
play pretend to give him a phial nearly full of water. He is assured that
this contains Cleopatra's tear. Well; who can disprove it? Munden
evidently recognized it. "What a large tear!" he exclaimed, Then they
place in his hands a druidical harp, which to vulgar eyes might resemble a
modern gridiron. He touches the chords gently; "pipes to the spirit
ditties of no tone;" and you imagine Aeolian strains. At last William
Tell's cap is produced. The people who affect to cheat him, apparently cut
the rim from a modern hat, and place the skull-cap in his hands; and then
begins the almost finest piece of acting that I ever witnessed. Munden
accepts the accredited cap of Tell with confusion and reverence. He places
it slowly and solemnly on his head, growing taller in the act of crowning
himself. Soon he swells into the heroic size,--a great archer,--and enters
upon his dreadful task. He weighs the arrow carefully; he tries the
tension of the bow, the elasticity of the string; and finally, after a
most deliberate aim, he permits the arrow to fly, and looks forward at the
same time with intense anxiety. You hear the twang, you see the hero's
knitted forehead, his eagerness; you tremble: at last you mark his calmer
brow, his relaxing smile, and are satisfied that the son is saved! It is
difficult to paint in words this extraordinary performance, which I have
several times seen; but you feel that it is transcendent. You think of
Sagittarius, in the broad circle of the Zodiac; you recollect that archery
is as old as Genesis; you are reminded that Ishmael, the son of Hagar,
wandered about the Judaean deserts, and became an archer.

The old actor is now dead; but on his last performance, when he was to act
Sir Robert Bramble, on the night of his taking final leave of the stage,