[8] Dr. Doran omits "this raised a prodigious and continued hiss, Harlequin all the while suspended in the air." [Illustration: MR. MACKLIN AS SHYLOCK.] CHAPTER III. CHARLES MACKLIN. A little child, about the last year of the reign of William III.,--a boy who is said to have been born, _Anno Domini_ 1690, was taken to Derry, to kiss the hand of, and wish a happy new year to, the old head of his family, Mr. M'Laughlin. This ceremony was kept up in the family circle, because the M'Laughlins were held to be of royal descent, and the Mr. M'Laughlin in question to be the representative of some line of ancient kings of Ireland! In the summer of 1797, an old actor is dying out in Tavistock Row, Covent Garden. Hull and Munden, and Davies and Ledger, and friends on and off the stage, occasionally look in and talk of old times with that ancient man, whose memory, however, is weaker than his frame. He has been an eccentric but rare player in his day. He had acted with contemporaries of Betterton; had seen, or co-operated with, every celebrity of the stage since; and did not withdraw from that stage till after Braham, who was among us but as yesterday, had sung his first song on it. He gave counsel to old Charles Mathews, and he may have seen little Edmund Kean being carried in a woman's arms from the neighbourhood of Leicester Square to Drury Lane Theatre, where the pale little fellow had to act an imp in a pantomime. The old man, carried, in the summer last named, to his grave in the corner of St. Paul's, Covent Garden, was the child who had done homage to a traditional king of Ireland, so many years before. If Macklin (as Charles M'Laughlin came to call himself) was born at the date above given, the incidents of his life connect him with very remote periods. He was born two months before King William gained the battle of the Boyne;[9] and he lived to hear of Captain Nelson's prowess, to read of the departure to India of that Lieutenant-Colonel Wellesley, whose career of martial glory culminated at Waterloo, and to have seen, perhaps, a smart young lad, just then in his teens, the Hon. Henry Temple,--now Viscount Palmerston and Prime Minister of England! Five sovereigns and five-and-twenty administrations, from Godolphin to Pitt, succeeded each other, while Charles Macklin was thus progressing on his journey of life.