in sharp contrast; and that contrast can never
have been better realised than by Keeley and
Harley in the same play: as when the former
played Sir Andrew to the Clown of the latter,
in that very comedy of Twelfth Night,
about which Charles Lamb gossips so
delightfully. The contrast was even more effectively
shown in Sheridan's Rivals, when Harley was
the Acres, and Keeley the David. His more
ambitious successors of the present day would
scarcely submit to the degradation of playing
David, to the Acres of a fellow-comedian of
even equal standing in the salary-list of their
theatre, however much nature may have fitted
them for the one part, and unfitted them for the
other. Keeley knew better; and what a
delicious David he was! Though forced by the
false, though most attractive art which
inspired that school of comedy, to talk in a
succession of epigrams, as rounded and
brilliant as the wittiest fashionable of them all,
Keeley made David a miracle of stolid
rusticity: a man of one idea, very much in earnest,
both in his disgust with his master's follies and
in his anxiety for him which in Keeley's hands
acquired a touch of pathos from the devotion
of the man.

For Keeley was a master of pathos in his
way, and many of our most delightful
memories of him are connected with characters
into which, by a few words or a little touch,
he threw a certain homely tenderness quite his
own. He never strained that chord too far,
but struck it, as it were, in passing, relying
upon delicate ears to catch the sound as it fell.
By the general public, perhaps, this power of
his was not as fully recognised as it might have
been. Poor Robson could make his audience
laugh and cry alternately, at his will; and that
he could do so was due to what was really an
artistic defect in his acting. He was an actor
of genius; but of subtlety he had little or none.
He did not hint himself to his audience; he
threw himself broadly at them; and he could
bound at once, without preparation or
gradation, from pathos to fun. Not so Keeley;
subtle his acting was, in the highest degree;
and his light and shade were most delicately
and beautifully blended. He must have
suffered sometimes, from the misplaced laughter
of gods and groundlings (stalls not always
excepted), at moments when his own eyes were
filled with tears. For he was too sensitive an
artist not to feel, when his part gave scope for
feeling. All audiences, however, contain some
delicate perception; and it is not only by
critics and constant playgoers, that Keeley is
remembered as among the most touching, as
well as the drollest, of actors.

Of the personal regard of the public, he had
an extraordinary share. One great difference
between French and English audiences is, that
the former have the higher feeling for the art,
the latter for the artist. The noisy "receptions"
which a favourite actor obtains with us, whenever
he appears on the stage, are sometimes
rather excessive in their demonstration; but
they are very infectious, withal, in their
enthusiasm, and are, doubtless, most inspiriting to
the performer. At a French theatre, an actor,
however established his reputation and great
his popularity, often has no "reception;" the
tribute is confined to special occasions, as
when he appears in some part which he has
"created." It is the part, as it were, that is
applauded in advance, and not the artist.
There is something pleasant in the personal
affection of a British audience, who make
no such nice distinctions. Of that personal
regard which unites us with our theatrical
favourites, Keeley had a lion's share, and
it followed him in his retirement so faithfully,
that when the town heard of his death
the other day, it regretted him as much as
if he had left the world and the stage
together.

In one sense, indeed, he did so: for though
it was to all intents and purposes certain for
some time past that he would never act again,
he took no formal farewell of the theatre—a
device, which is painful when it is real, as too
rude and material a severing of the link between
actor and public; but which of late years has
been too often a fiction, a prelude to a
succession of "last appearances" which provoke
laughter and extinguish regret. We have no
drawbacks of that nature on our recollections
of Keeley; and we have still the consolation
of hoping that his other half, the partner of
his name and popularity—so closely united with
him that we can never think of the one without
the other—may not be entirely lost to the
stage. We saw Keeley act on the occasion
which proved to be his last appearance, when
he played his old part of Dolly Spanker: one of
the most finished figures in his portrait gallery.
The little trot across the stage—the "Here I
am, Gay"—the grotesque devotion and not
unmanly weakness of the doting husband—made
up a picture whose colours time had not in the
least blurred or faded when he played for the
last time. The stage was as elastic under his
feet as it ever was in his best days; and he
never allowed us to feel that he had outstayed
his time. Ah! The laudatores temporis acti
have reason on their side when they talk
of the theatrical companies of old days, if there
were many like him!

We do not profess in this little paper to
attempt anything like an exhaustive criticism on
Keeley's acting, or, indeed, anything that
can properly be called criticism. Our
purpose does not extend beyond a few words
of admiring remembrance and regret: a
momentary lingering on lost intellectual
delights. We have mentioned his Dogberry.
As we write, we hear again the very inflexions
of his voice, and see again the wonderful
expression of his face, at the supreme
moment when he was called an Ass! No other
catastrophe on earth, or in the waters under it,
could have aroused in living man such an
amazing exposition of stupendous astonishment,
indignation, and incredulity, as that insult
wrung from Dogberry as Keeley drew him.
But his Verges was even finer. By the force