It is unquestionably among the unaccountable things connected with ‘the stage’ that Kemble’s farewell performances in London, 1817, were as a whole unproductive. Those closing nights, not answering the manager’s expectations of their attraction, were given for benefits to those performers who chose to pay the extra price. Macready was not present on the closing night of all, when Kemble nobly played his peerless Coriolanus; but he witnessed several other representations, and he dwells especially on the last performance of ‘Macbeth,’ when Mrs. Siddons acted the Lady to her brother’s Macbeth. Macready was disappointed with both. Mrs. Siddons was no longer the enchantress of old: ‘years had done their work, and those who had seen in her impersonations the highest glories of her art, now felt regret that she had been prevailed on to leave her honoured retirement, and force a comparison between the grandeur of the past and the feeble present. It was not a performance, but a mere repetition of the poet’s text; no flash, no sign of her pristine, all-subduing genius.’ Kemble, as Macbeth, was ‘correct, tame, and ineffective,’ through the first four acts of the play, which moved heavily on; but he was roused to action in the fifth act. With action there was pathos; and ‘all at once, he seemed carried away by the genius of the scene.’ Macready brings the scene itself before his readers, ending with the words: ‘His shrinking from Macduff, when the charm on which his life hung was broken, by the declaration that his antagonist “was not of woman born,” was a masterly stroke of art. His subsequent defiance was most heroic; and, at his death, Charles Kemble received him in his arms and laid him gently on the ground, his physical powers being unequal to further effort.’ Of persons non-dramatic, many pass before the mind’s eye of the reader. Lord Nelson visited the Birmingham Theatre, and Macready noted his pale and interesting face, and listened so eagerly to all he uttered that for months after he used to be called upon to repeat ‘what Lord Nelson said to your father,’ which was to the effect that the esteem in which the elder Macready was held by the town made it ‘a pleasure and a duty’ for Lord Nelson to visit the theatre. With the placid and mournful-looking Admiral was Lady Hamilton, who laughed loud and long, clapped her uplifted hands with all her heart, and kicked her heels against the foot-board of her seat, as some verses were sung in honour of her and England’s hero.