Charles Macklin represents contradiction, sarcasm, irritability, restlessness. It came of a double source,--his descent and the line of characters which he most affected. His father was a stern Presbyterian farmer, in Ulster; his mother, a rigid Roman Catholic. At the siege of Derry, three of his uncles were among the besiegers, and three among the besieged; and he had another,--a Roman Catholic priest, who undertook to educate him, but who consigned the mission to Nature. I have somewhere read that at five-and-thirty, Macklin could not read, perfectly; but _that_ is a fable; or at eight or nine, he could hardly have played Monimia, in private theatricals, at the house of the good Ulster lady, who looked after him more carefully than the priest, and more tenderly than Nature. In after years, Quin said of Macklin that he had--not _lines_ in his face, but _cordage_; and again, on seeing Macklin dressed and painted for Shylock, Quin remarked that if ever Heaven had written villain on a brow it was on that fellow's! One can hardly fancy that the gentle Monimia could ever have found a representative in one who came to be thus spoken of; but he is said to have succeeded in this respect, perfectly, and in voice, feature, and action, to have counterfeited that most interesting of orphans with great success. It was a fatal success, in one sense. It inspired the boy with a desire to act on a wider stage. It created in him a disgust for the vocation to which he was destined,--that of a saddler,--from which he ran away before he was apprentice enough to sew a buckle on a girth; and the lad made off for the natural attraction of all Irish lads,--Dublin. His ambition could both soar and stoop; and he entered Trinity College as a badge-man or porter, which illustrious place and humble office he quitted in 1710. Except that he turned stroller, and suffered the sharp pangs which strollers feel,--and enjoyed the roving life led by players on the tramp, little is here known of him. He seems to have served some five years to this rough and rollicking apprenticeship, and then to have succeeded in being allowed to appear at Lincoln's Inn Fields, in 1725, as Alcander, in "OEdipus." His manner of speaking was found too "familiar," that is, too _natural_. He had none, he said, of the hoity-toity, sing-song delivery then in vogue; and Rich recommended him to _go to grass again_; and accordingly to green fields and strolling he returned.