If Macready, on his _début_ as a boy, was scared, he was deeply moved when, within a stone’s throw of sixty, he was to act for the last time, and then go home for ever. This was upwards of thirty years ago, so rapidly does time fly--the 28th of February, 1851. His emotion was not in the acting, but in the taking leave of it, and of those who came to see it for the last time. He says himself of his Macbeth that he never played it better than on that night. There was a reality, with a vigour, truth, and dignity, which he thought he had never before thrown into that favourite character. ‘I rose with the play, and the last scene was a real climax.’ On his first entrance, indeed, at the beginning of his part, ‘the thought occurred to me of the presence of my children, and that for a minute overcame me; but I soon recovered myself into self-possession.’ Still more deeply moved at the ‘farewell’ to a house bursting into a wild enthusiasm of applause, he ‘faltered for a moment at the fervent, unbounded expression of attachment from all before me; but preserved my self-possession.’ Those of his ten children who had survived and were present on that occasion had ample reason to be proud of their father. For many years he would not sanction their being present at his public exhibitions. This was really to doubt the dignity and usefulness of his art, to feel a false shame, and to authorise in others that contempt for the ‘playactor’ which, entertaining it, as he did thoroughly, for many of his fellows, he neither felt for himself nor for those whom he could recognise as being great and worthy masters in that art. When his children were allowed the new delight of witnessing how nobly he could interpret the noblest of the poets, the homage of their reverential admiration must have been added to that of their unreserved affection. That he was not popular at any time with inferior or subordinate players is undoubtedly true. Such persons thought that only want of luck and opportunity placed them lower in the scale than Macready. It would be as reasonable for the house-painters to account in the same way for their not being Vandycks and Raffaelles.