William Macready’s position there in 1793 was much the same that it was when he first appeared. Perhaps he had a little improved it, by the popular farce of which he was the author, ‘The Irishman in London,’ which was first acted at Covent Garden in 1792. In 1793 he was held good enough to act Cassio to Middleton’s Othello, and was held cheap enough to be cast for Fag in the ‘Rivals.’ On his benefit night--he was in a position to share the house with Hull--the two partners played such walking gentlemen’s characters as Cranmer and Surrey (the latter by Macready) to the Wolsey and Queen Catharine of Mr. and Mrs. Pope; but Macready, in the afterpiece, soared to vivacious comedy, and acted Figaro to the Almaviva of mercurial Lewis. If he ever played an Irish part, it was only when Jack Johnstone was indisposed--which was not his custom of an afternoon. The best of these actors, and others better than the best named above, received but very moderate salaries. Mr. Macready’s was probably not more than three or four pounds per week. Upon certainly some such salary the worthy actor maintained a quiet home in Mary Street, Tottenham Court (or Hampstead) Road. At the head of the little family that gathered round the table in Mary Street was one of the best of mothers; and chief among the children--the one at least who became the most famous--was William Charles Macready, whom so many still remember as a foremost actor, and in whom some even recognised a great master of his art. Among the earliest remembrances of this eminent player, he has noticed in his most interesting ‘Reminiscences,’ that ‘the _res angustæ domi_ called into active duty all the economical resources and active management of a mother’ (whose memory, he says, is enshrined in his heart’s fondest gratitude) ‘to supply the various wants’ of himself and an elder sister, who only lived long enough to make him ‘sensible of her angelic nature.’ Macready was the fifth child of this family, but his sister, Olivia, was the only one (then born) who lived long enough for him to remember. She was older than he by a year and a half, and she survived only till he was just in his sixth year; ‘but she lives,’ he says, ‘like a dim and far-off dream, to my memory, of a spirit of meekness, love, and truth, interposing itself between my infant will and the evil it purposed. It is like a vision of an angelic influence upon a most violent and self-willed disposition.’