When our traveller set out from London, he was assured that the house would open in the beginning of October, but it was November before the season commenced; so that his finances were once more exhausted, and he was obliged to apply to the friend to whom Macklin had recommended him, for a farther supply. The acting manager was one D——, a busy, bustling fellow, void of all civility, who pretended to carry the world before him. Mr Holcroft soon discovered that there was an insurmountable antipathy between this man’s disposition and his own. But the means of his subsistence were at stake; he endeavoured, therefore, to accommodate himself to the other’s temper as much as possible, and waited for the arrival of Macklin with the utmost impatience. He understood that his engagement had been permanently fixed at thirty shillings a week; but, when he went to the treasury, he found it reduced to a guinea; and whenever he pleaded his engagement, received the most mortifying and insulting answers. He discovered the entire improbability of his becoming a favourite. None were such but those who could administer the grossest flattery, and who industriously listened to whatever was said in the theatre concerning this petty despot and his management, in order to repeat it in the ear of their employer. Holcroft had vainly imagined that the presence of Macklin would put an end to all his grievances: he looked up to him as his patron, as one who had been the occasion of his leaving England, who had pledged himself to be his friend, and was bound to protect him. Whether D—— had prejudiced him against Holcroft, or whether Macklin himself was aware of his deficiency in the honeyed arts of adulation, he could not determine; but he found him very cold in his interest, and far more disposed to browbeat than countenance him. He had, as we have seen, promised to teach him a part, and bring him out in it; but when he ventured to remind him of it, he received only sarcastic remarks on his incapacity. Holcroft, however, persisted in asserting the positiveness of his agreement with respect to his salary, concerning which Macklin had the meanness to equivocate; but he succeeded in obtaining an addition of four shillings a week.