GERMAN ENTHUSIASM.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1116, 3 July 1883, Page 3

GERMAN ENTHUSIASM.

Mr Edwin Booth’s theatrical campaign in Germany has been a great success. In Hamburg all the places were bought up weeks in advance at a premium. The press notices were very cordial, and the stage manager, a pupil of Davaient, said that he had never till then seen Hamlet and Lear. Herr Maurice, the manager, announced Edwin Booth the greatest actor who had been seen since Palmer s death. When he was playing Lear the witness states that it was the most pathetic to see the people sobbing at the wings. The actors engaged to support the star are described as perfectly wild with enthusiasm. In fact their admiration took an unpleasant demonstrative form. The men fell upon his shoulders, and in Continental fashion kissed him on both cheeks : while the women wept and sobbed as they shook hands with him. He did not relish the kissing. In vain he cried out— ‘ Mind the paint?’ And at last, in a sort of comic desperation, he exclaimed: ‘lf kissing be the correct thing, please stand aside, gentlemen, and let the ladies advance.’ On another occasion we learn that after the curtain had fallen amid deafening applause, Mr Booth was embraced by every member of the company, ‘except the extra little girls engaged to act as pages. ’ But as he left the theatre the extia little girls were waiting for him in the hall, and ‘in a perfectly artless and modest manner,’ one of them approached him, and in broken English said through her tears : * Mr Booth you make us cry—we do want so much to kiss you.’ We do not know whether Mr Booth cried out: ( Mind the paint,’ on this occasion.