Between this and his first appearance in London Macready acted in most of the theatres of every degree in the three kingdoms. Often this practice was rendered the more valuable by his having to perform with the most perfect actors and actresses who were starring in the country. But, whether with them or without, whether with audiences or with a mere two or three, he did his best. Like Barton Booth, he would play to a man in the pit. ‘It was always my rule,’ he says, ‘to make the best out of a bad house, and before the most meagre audiences ever assembled it has been my invariable practice to strive my best, using the opportunity as a lesson; and I am conscious of having derived great benefit from the rule. I used to call it acting to myself.’ Macready had another rule which is worth mentioning. Some of the old French tragedy queens used to keep themselves all day in the temper of the characters they were to represent in the evening. So that, at home or on the boards, they swept to and fro in towering rage. So, Macready was convinced of the necessity of keeping, on the day of exhibition, the mind as intent as possible on the subject of the actor’s portraiture, even to the very moment of his entrance on the scene. With the observance of this rule, Macready must have made 64 Frith Street, Soho, re-echo with joyous feelings and ebullitions of fury, to suit the temper of the night, when in 1816 he made his bow to a London audience as Orestes in the ‘Distressed Mother,’ and when the curtain rose grasped Abbot almost convulsively by the hand, and dashed upon the stage, exclaiming as in a transport of the highest joy, ‘Oh, Pylades! what’s life without a friend?’ The Orestes was a success; but it was never a favourite character with the public, as Talma’s was with the French. The career thus begun (at ten, fifteen, and at last eighteen pounds per week for five years) came to a close in 1851. Five-and-thirty years out of the fifty-eight Macready had then reached. We need not trace this progressive career, beginning with Ambrose Phillips and ending with Shakespeare (‘Macbeth’). During that career he created that one great character in which no player could come near him, namely, Virginius, in 1820. Macready, however, was not the original representative of Virginius. That character in Knowles’s most successful play was first acted by John Cooper in Glasgow; but Macready really created the part in London. Further, Macready did his best to raise the drama, actors, and audiences to a dignity never before known, and gained nothing but honour by his two ventures at management. He was the first to put a play upon the stage with an almost lavish perfection. In this way he was never equalled. Mr. Charles Kean imitated him in this artist-like proceeding; but that highly respectable actor and man was as far behind Macready in magnificence of stage management as he was distant from his own father in genius.