It is a strange and repulsive thing to look back at the sarcasm flung at him by the vile part of the press at that time, for his enabling honest-minded women to visit a theatre without feeling ashamed at their being there, in company with those who had no honest-mindedness. In this, as in many other circumstances, he was worth all the Lord Chamberlains--silly, intruding, inconsistent, unreasonable beings--that have ever existed. The career of the actor--we may say, of the actor and of the private gentleman--was a long one. Among the great dramatic personages whom Macready saw in the course of that career, were ‘a glimpse of King dressed as Lord Ogilvy,’ his original character, ‘and distinguished for its performance in Garrick’s day;’ Lewis, whose face he never forgot, but he never saw that restless, ever-smiling actor on the stage. Macready was struck with the beauty and deportment of Mrs. Siddons, long before he acted with her; and he was enthralled by Mrs. Billington, though he could in after years only recall the figure of a very lusty woman, and the excitement of the audience when the orchestra struck up the symphony of Arne’s rattling bravura, ‘The Soldier Tired,’ in the opera of ‘Artaxerxes.’ One of the most remarkable of these illustrious persons was seen by him at the Birmingham Theatre, 1808. The afterpiece was ‘Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogene,’ a ballet pantomime. The lady fair was acted by the manager’s wife, Mrs. Watson--ungainly, tawdry, and as fat as a porpoise, an enormous hill of flesh. Alonzo the Brave was represented by ‘a little mean-looking man in a shabby green satin dress ... the only impression I carried away was that the hero and heroine were the worst in the piece’ (a ballet of action, without words). Macready adds that he neither knew nor guessed that ‘under that shabby green satin dress was hidden one of the most extraordinary theatrical geniuses that have ever illustrated the dramatic poetry of England!’ In half a dozen years more, what was Macready’s astonishment to find this little, insignificant Alonzo the Brave had burst out into the grandly impassioned personator of Othello, Richard, and Shylock--Edmund Kean!