This famous decade of the New York stage saw other great actors and other great Hamlets, some of whom in point of time preceded Kean and Booth. Joseph George Holman played Hamlet at the Park Theatre in September, 1812, James William Wallack, on the same stage, in September, 1818, Robert Campbell Maywood in 1819, John Jay Adams in 1822, William Augustus Conway in 1824, Thomas Hamblin in 1825, and last, but not least, William Charles Macready in October, 1826. [Illustration: WILLIAM C. MACREADY.] Of the Hamlet of John R. Duff there is, strange to say, no record in New York, although he played here occasionally between the years 1814 and 1827. He was very popular in Boston and Philadelphia, and a writer in the Boston _Centinel_, in the autumn of 1810, does "not hesitate to say, that in some of the scenes [of _Hamlet_], and those of no ordinary grade of difficulty, he has never been excelled on the Boston boards." His wife is still considered by certain old play-goers to have been the best Ophelia ever seen in the United States, and no account of the tragedy in this country can be complete without mention of her name. As Ophelia, in New York and elsewhere, she supported the elder Booth, the elder Kean, the elder Conway, Cooper, Payne, Wallack, and other stars; and Mr. Booth wrote to George Holland in 1836 that he considered her "the greatest actress in the world." Mr. Macready was the first of a trio of remarkable Hamlets who came to this country from England at about the same period. Charles Kean was the second, in 1830, Charles Kemble the third, in 1832. Of Macready's Hamlet he says himself, in his _Reminiscences_: "The thought and practice I have through my professional career devoted to it, made it in my own judgment and in those [_sic_] of critics whom I had most reason to fear and respect, one of the most finished, though not the most popular, in my _repertoire_." In Cole's _Biography of Charles Kean_, inspired by its subject and written under his direction, if not at his dictation, is the following account of his first attempt at Hamlet: "The new Hamlet was received with enthusiasm. From his entrance to the close of the performance the applause was unanimous and incessant. The celebrated 'Is it the King?' in the third act, produced an electrical effect. To use a favorite expression of his father's, 'The pit rose at him.'" Concerning the Hamlet of Charles Kemble, his daughter wrote, in 1832: "I have acted Ophelia three times with my father, and each time in that beautiful scene where his madness and his love gush forth together, like a torrent swollen with storms that bears a thousand blossoms on its turbid waters, I have experienced such deep emotion as hardly to be able to speak.... Now the great beauty of all my father's performances, but particularly of Hamlet, is a wonderful accuracy in the detail of the character which he represents," etc.