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THERE is
XV
Edwin Booth
no occasion for me to
discuss minutely the work of him
whose art was the crown of our
tragic stage during nearly all the second
half of the nineteenth century, — of Ed-
win Booth, claruni et venerabile nomen.
There had been scarcely a break in the
reign of his dynasty for the sevent3'-two
years between 1821, when the wonderful
Junius Brutus Booth, Sr., began to act in
the United States, and 1893, when the
son, Edwin, after a life strangely mixed
of gloom and glory, " passed to where
beyond these voices there is peace." The
elder tragedian died in 1852, and in 1852
the younger, at the age of nineteen, in
California, was playing "general utility
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