Sensitive to criticism he was, and yet scarcely believed himself to be so. He belabours critics pretty roughly; but we observe that theatrical critics dined with him occasionally, and we mark that he praises the good sense and discrimination of one of these critics--whose criticism was very much in the actor’s favour. Vanity he also had, certainly. We should have come to this conclusion, had we nothing more to justify the assertion than what we find in his own record. We see his vanity in the superabundant excess of his modesty; but we think none the worse of him for it. An artist who is not somewhat vain of his powers has, probably, no ground for a little wholesome pride. It was in Macready tempered with that sort of fear that a vain man may feel, lest in the exercise of his art he should fall in the slightest degree short of his self-estimation, or of that in which he believed himself to be held by the public. He never, on entering a town, saw his name on a bill, without feeling a flutter of the heart, made up of this mingled fear and pride. So, Mrs. Siddons never went on the stage at any time without something of the same sensation. We should think little of any actor or actress who should avow that they ever ‘went on,’ in a great part, without some hesitation lest the attempt might fall short of what it was their determination to achieve, and what they felt themselves qualified to accomplish. Vanity and timidity? All true artists are conscious of both--ought to possess both; just as they ought to possess not only impulse but judgment; not only head, but heart; heart to flash the impulses, head to control them. Macready carried to the stage his genuine piety. It is, perhaps, a little too much aired in his ‘Diary,’ but it is not the less to be believed in. He went by a good old-fashioned rule, to do his duty in that state of life to which it had pleased God to call him--as the Catechism teaches, or used to teach, all of us. In his pious fervour, in his prayers that what he is going to act may be for good, that what in the management he has undertaken may be to the increase of the general happiness rather than to that of his banking account; in these and a score of other instances we are reminded of those French and Italian saints of the stage who, as they stood at the wing, crossed themselves at the sound of sacred names in the play; or, who counted their beads in the green-room; kept their fasts; mortified themselves, and never missed a mass. Nay, the religious feeling was as spontaneous in Macready as it was in the Italian actors whom he himself saw, and who, at the sound of the ‘Angelus’ in the street, stopped the action of the play, fell on their knees, gently tapped their breasts, and were imitated in these actions by the sympathising majority of the audience.