diverting war of sections to drown all else, Jefferson would have come to
his growth and taken his place as the first serio-comic actor of his time.

Rip Van Winkle was an evolution. Jefferson's half-brother, Charles Burke,
had put together a sketchy melodrama in two acts and had played in it, was
playing in it when he died. After his Trenchard, Jefferson turned himself
loose in all sorts of parts, from Diggory to Mazeppa, a famous burlesque,
which he did to a turn, imitating the mock heroics of the feminine horse
marines, so popular in the equestrian drama of the period, Adah Isaacs
Menken, the beautiful and ill-fated, at their head. Then he produced
a version of Nicholas Nickleby, in which his Newman Noggs took a more
ambitious flight. These, however, were but the avant-couriers of the
immortal Rip.

Charles Burke's piece held close to the lines of Irving's legend. When the
vagabond returns from the mountains after the twenty years' sleep Gretchen
is dead. The apex is reached when the old man, sitting dazed at a table in
front of the tavern in the village of Falling Water, asks after Derrick Van
Beekman and Nick Vedder and other of his cronies. At last, half twinkle of
humor and half glimmer of dread, he gets himself to the point of asking
after Dame Van Winkle, and is told that she has been dead these ten years.
Then like a flash came that wonderful Jeffersonian change of facial
expression, and as the white head drops upon the arms stretched before him
on the table he says: "Well, she led me a hard life, a hard life, but she
was the wife of my bosom, she was _meine frau!_"

I did not see the revised, or rather the newly-created and written, Rip
Van Winkle until Mr. Jefferson brought it to America and was playing it at
Niblo's Garden in New York. Between himself and Dion Boucicault a drama
carrying all the possibilities, all the lights and shadows of his genius