Macready at once got it accepted at the theatre, where nothing was spent on scenery, but there was a good cast, and the enthusiasm of Macready as stage manager for the occasion half affronted some of his seniors. On the 17th of May, 1820, about a month after it came into Macready's hands, _Virginius_ was produced at Covent Garden, where, says the actor in his "Reminiscences," "the curtain fell amidst the most deafening applause of a highly-excited auditory." Sheridan Knowles's fame, therefore, was made, like that of his friend Macready, and the friendship between author and actor continued. Sheridan Knowles had a kindly simplicity of character, and the two qualities for which an actor most prizes a dramatist, skill in providing opportunities for acting that will tell, and readiness to make any changes that the actor asks for. The postscript to his first letter to Macready was, "Make any alterations you like in any part of the play, and I shall be obliged to you." When he brought to the great actor his play of _William Tell_--_Caius Gracchus_ had been produced in November, 1823--there were passages of writing in it that stopped the course of action, and, says Macready, "Knowles had less of the tenacity of authorship than most writers," so that there was no difficulty about alterations, Macready having in a very high degree the tenacity of actorship. And so, in 1825, _Tell_ became another of Macready's best successes. Sheridan Knowles continued to write for the stage until 1845, when he was drawn wholly from the theatre by a religious enthusiasm that caused him, in 1851, to essay the breaking of a lance with Cardinal Wiseman on the subject of Transubstantiation. Sir Robert Peel gave ease to his latter days by a pension of 200 pounds a year from the Civil List, which he had honourably earned by a career as dramatist, in which he sought to appeal only to the higher sense of literature, and to draw enjoyment from the purest source. Of his plays time two comedies {1} here given are all that have kept their place upon the stage. As one of the most earnest dramatic writers of the present century he is entitled to a little corner in our memory. Worse work of the past has lasted longer than the plays of Sheridan Knowles are likely to last through the future. H. M. THE HUNCHBACK. DRAMATIS PERSONAE.