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E. A. SOTHERN, SR.
inverted as in a moment. It was something
as if Osric had pushed himself in front of
Hamlet. And no one was more surprised
than Mr. Sothern himself. Whence the
actor derived the outside of his impersona-
tion I have not been informed. Its sub-
stratum was the conventional dandy of the
theatre, of course, — one of the foolishest
and unrealest of fictions, — and Continental
Europe had evolved a caricature of the
traveling Britisher which adumbrated Mr.
Sothern's make-up ; but the aggregation
of Lord Dundreary's oddities could hardly
have originated with the actor. I think he
must have encountered somewhere an Eng-
lishman whose whole dress, speech, and
manner displayed the courage of a mon-
strous eccentricity. Here, at all events,
was a bird of a new feather, — of a new
variety, species, genus.
Who that looked upon the noble lord
can ever forget the glare of his monocle,
and the rigid play of the muscles that held
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