It may be added here that Macready had a younger brother, Edward, who distinguished himself as a gallant officer in the army, and two younger sisters, Letitia and Ellen, to whom he was an affectionate brother and friend. Meanwhile Macready passed creditably through a school at Birmingham, and thence to Rugby. At the latter place, where one of his kinsmen was a master, the student laid the ground of all the classical knowledge he possessed, took part in private plays, and was hurt at the thought that he had any inclination to be a professional actor. At Rugby, too, he showed, but with some reason, the fiery quality of his temper. He was unjustly sent up for punishment, and was flogged accordingly. ‘Returning,’ he says, ‘to my form, smarting with choking rage and indignation, where I had to encounter the compassion of some and the envious jeers of others, my passion broke out in the exclamation, “D----n old Birch! I wish he was in Hell!’” Macready’s excellent mother, of whom he never speaks without dropping, as it were, a flower to honour her memory, died before he reached home from Rugby, so that the world was, for a time, without sun to him, for the sire was not a very amiable person. The younger Macready resorted to the best possible cure for sorrow, steady and active work, and plenty of both. At last, with no very cheerful encouragement from his father and with doubt and fear on his own part, he, in June 1811, made his _début_, in Birmingham, in ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ ‘the part of Romeo by a Young Gentleman, being his first appearance on any stage.’ He, who was afterwards so very cool and self-possessed, nearly marred all by what is called ‘stage-fright.’ A mist fell on his eyes; the very applause, as he came forward, bewildered him; and he describes himself as being for some time like an automaton, moving in certain defined limits. ‘I went mechanically,’ he says, ‘through the variations in which I had drilled myself;’ but he gradually gained courage and power over himself. The audience stimulated the first and rewarded the second by their applause. ‘Thenceforward,’ says Macready, ‘I trod on air, became another being or a happier self, and when the curtain fell and the intimate friends and performers crowded on the stage to raise up the _Juliet_ and myself, shaking my hands with fervent congratulations, a lady asked me, ‘Well, sir, how do you feel now?’ my boyish answer was without disguise, ‘I feel as if I should like to act it all over again!’