It came; and there the triumph culminated. The actor was not loud, nor grotesque; but Shylock was natural, calmly confident, and so terribly malignant, that when he whetted his knife, to cut the forfeit from that bankrupt there, a shudder went round the house, and the profound silence following told Macklin that he held his audience by the heart-strings, and that his hearers must have already acknowledged the truth of his interpretation of Shakspeare's Jew. When the act-drop fell, then the pent-up feelings found vent, and Old Drury shook again with the tumult of applause. The critics went off to the coffee-houses in a state of pleasurable excitement. As for the other actors, Quin (Antonio) must have felt the master-mind of that night. Mrs. Pritchard (Nerissa), excellent judge as she was, must have enjoyed the terrible grandeur of that trial-scene; and even Kitty Clive (Portia) could not have dared, on that night, to do what she ordinarily made Portia do, in the disguise of young Bellario; namely, mimic the peculiarities of some leading lawyer of the day. And Macklin?--Macklin remarked, as he stood among his fellows, all of whom were, I hope, congratulatory, "I am not worth fifty pounds in the world; nevertheless, on this night am I Charles the Great!" That Pope was in the house on the third night, and that he pronounced Macklin to be the Jew that Shakspeare drew, is not improbable; but the statement that Macklin, soon after, dined with Pope and Bolingbroke at Battersea is manifestly untrue, for the latter was then living in retirement, at Fontainbleau. It could not have been in such company, at this period, that Pope asked the actor, why he dressed Shylock in a red hat, and that Macklin replied, it was because he had read in an old history that the Jews in Venice were obliged, by law, to wear a hat of that decided colour;--which was true. Macklin was proud and impetuous, and often lost engagements, by offending; and regained them by publicly apologising. He was an actor well established in favour, when, in the season of 1745-46, he made his first appearance as an author in an _àpropos_ tragedy for the '45 era, "Henry VII., or the Popish Impostor." The anachronism in the title is only to be matched by the violations done to chronology and propriety in the play,--a crude work, six weeks in the doing. It settles, however, in some degree, the time when Macklin left the Church of Rome for that of England. It must have been prior to the period in which he wrote the above-named piece. After it took place, he used to describe himself "as staunch a Protestant as the Archbishop of Canterbury, and on the same principles;"--a compliment, I suppose, to John Potter!