His laurels were menaced. Frederick Yates came from the camp, and flashed a promise in tragedy which moved the hearts of playgoers, who saw his later devotion to comedy with early regret, but an ultimate delight. Mr. Macready was steadily rising from melodrama to the highest walks of tragedy, and his golden opportunity came in Virginius. Hitherto, Kean had been shaking the secondary actors of the old Kemble type into fits of jealousy, fear, disgust, and admiration. Expressly for him did Knowles write the "Virginius," which gave a lasting celebrity to Mr. Macready. Already, however, had a play on the subject, by Soane, been accepted at Drury Lane, and in the Roman father Kean was for the first time designedly opposed to the younger actor, He utterly failed; while Mr. Macready, in the part written expressly, and by an able hand, for Kean, won a noble victory. Kean might have said as the captured French Marshal said to Marlborough:--"Change sides with me, and I'll fight it out again, to a very different issue." A range through his principal parts, and a running salute of thundering puffs on the part of Elliston, heralded his visit to America in 1820. He played at Liverpool before embarking, and like George Frederick Cooke, had a hit at the audience before he left them. They were the coldest people, he said, in whose presence he had ever acted. That was true: but though Liverpool was chary of approbation, it had applauded ungrateful Edmund more cordially than any other actor. From his first trip to America he brought back much solid gold, a detestation of the Boston people, who would not patronise the theatre at an unfashionable season of the year, and one of the toe-bones of Cooke, over whose translated and mutilated remains he raised the monument of which I have already spoken. Some ill-health he brought back with him too; but he rallied, drank, relapsed, and struggled into strength again. It was wasted on Miss Baillie's "De Montfort;" though parts of this were played in his grandest style. He seemed conscious that something was expected of him by the public, and he flung himself, as it were, at everything. He played Hastings to the Jane Shore of a Miss Edmiston--whose success was predicted by aristocratic poets, and who is now, I believe, painfully "strolling." With Sir Pertinax he did not move the dead Macklin as his Shylock may have done; though it was better played, save in the accent, than any living actor could have played it. His Osmond gave some dignity to the "Castle Spectre," and his Wolsey but little to "Henry VIII."