of a similar outrage, he will be taken on to the stage and compelled to ask pardon of the house; an honor, at which the fellow would, probably, have been exceedingly gratified.

We have a sample of the coolness of an Irish debutant and the patience of an audience of the last century; the first, in the person of Dexter, whom Garrick, on the secession of Barry from his company, brought over, with Ross and Mossop, from Dublin. Dexter, on the night of his first appearance, in Oronooko, was comfortably seated in the pit, where he remained chatting with his friends and supporters until the "second music" commenced. This music, in the old days, was ordinarily played half an hour before the curtain rose. This was a long period for an audience to be kept further waiting; but it was a short period wherein a tragedian might prepare and deck himself for a sort of solemn ordeal. The début proved successful; and Garrick generously expressed great admiration and hopefulness of the young actor, who, nevertheless, soon fell out of estimation of the audience, as might have been expected, from the cool and careless proceeding of his first night, when he walked out of a crowded pit to hastily dress himself for an arduous part.

This was a sort of liberty which a French pit would not have tolerated. It bore, however, with other freedoms. When it laughed, as the children were brought in, in "Inez de Castro," Madame Duclos, who was the weeping Incz, turned suddenly round, and exclaimed, "Fools! it's the most touching part of the piece!" and then resumed weeping. Again: Du Fresne, acting Sévére, in "Polyeucte," speaking low as he was confiding a perilous secret to a friend, was interrupted by cries of "louder ! louder!" "And you, sirs, not so loud!" cried the calmly-angry actor, to a pit which took the rebuke meekly ;—as meckly as our public took the verdict of Foote, who says, in his Treatise on the Passions,— "There are twelve thousand play-goers in London; but not the four-and-twentieth part of them can judge correctly of the merits of play or players."

Then, considering the measure of respect which actors used to profess that they entertained for audiences, the liberties which the former occasionally took with the latter was remarkable. When Mrs. Griffiths's "Wife in the Right" was coldly received, she laid

the blame on Shuter (Governor Andrews), who had neglected to attend rehearsal. On a succeeding night, accordingly, the audience hissed, as soon as he appeared. He defended himself, by asserting that illness had kept him from rehearsal; "but, gentlemen," said he, "if there is any one here who wants to know if I had been drunk three days before, I acknowledge that I had, and beg pardon for that." The audience forgave the rude actor, and condemned the play.

Again: a few years subsequently, at York, Mrs. Montagu was cast for the Queen, in Hull's romantic play, "Henry II." She was a great favorite; and she claimed the more agreeable part of Rosamond, which had been taken by Mrs. Hudson, the play being acted for her benefit. Mrs. Montagu refused to study the part of Queen Eleanor; and under the plea of illness preventing study, she sent an actor forward to state that she would read the part. Mrs. Hudson's friends insisted on Mrs. Montagu appearing, to explain her own case; and then the imperious lady swept on to the stage, with the saucy exclamation, "Who's afraid?" and the equally saucy intimation, that she would read the part, for she had not had time to learn it. This excited the wrath of the house; and some one cried out, that the audience would rather hear it read by the cook-wench at the next ale-house, than by her. Then, dame Montagu, as she was called, fired by the remark, and by cries forbidding her to read and commanding her to act, looked scornfully at the pit, flung the book which she held into the centre of the crowd, and with a "There!-curse you all!" swept off the stage, amid the mingled hisses and laughter of the house. But she was not permitted to act again.

Covent Garden audiences were more patient with saucy actresses; and they could even bear with Mrs. Lesingham, the handsome and too intimate friend of Harris, the proprietor, coming on to speak a prologue, in which she was so imperfect, that a man stood close to her with a copy, to prompt her in the words. For less disrespect than this, the same audience had demanded the dismissal of an actor, and condemned him to penury. Macklin suffered twice in this way, from the capricious but cruel judgment of the house; and having here mentioned his name, I will proceed to notice the career of a mar who belongs to so many eras.

CHAPTER XIV.

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 Matthews, and he may have seen little Edmund Kean being carried in a woman's arms from the neighborhood 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; and he lived to hear of Captain Nelson's prowess, to read of the departure to India of that LieutenantColonel 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-andtwenty administrations, from Godolphin to Pitt, succeeded each other, while Charles Macklin was thus progressing on his journey of life.

Charles Macklin represents contradiction, sarcasm, irritability, restlessness. It all 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-andthirty, Macklin could not read, perfectly; but that is a fable; or at eight or nine he could hardly have played Mouimia, 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 "Edipus." 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.

I suppose some manager had his eye on Macklin at Southwark Fair, in 1730, for he passed thence immediately to Lincoln's Inn Fields. He played small parts, noticed in another page, and was probably thankful to get them, not improving his cast till he went to Drury Lane, in 1733, when he played the elder Cibber's line of characters, and in 1735, created Snip, in the farce of the "Merry Cobbler," and came thereby in peril of his life. One evening, a fellow-actor, Hallam, grandfather of merry Mrs. Mattocks, took from Macklin's dressing-room, a wig, which the latter wore in the farce. The players were in the "scene-room," some of them seated on the settle in front of the fire, when a quarrel broke out between Hallam and Macklin, which was carried on so loudly that the actors then concluding the first piece were disturbed by it. Hallam, at length, surrendered the "property," but after doing so, used words of such offence, that Macklin, equally unguarded in language, and more unguarded in action, struck at him with his cane, in order to thrust him from the room. Unhappily, the cane penetrated through Hallam's eye, to the brain, and killed him. Macklin's deep concern could not save him from standing at the bar of the Old Bailey, on a charge of murder. The jury returned him guilty of manslaughter, without malice aforethought, and the contrite actor was permitted to return to his duty.

Among the friends he possessed was Mrs. Booth, widow of Barton Booth, in whose house was domiciled as companion, a certain Grace Purvor, who could dance almost as well as Santlow herself, and had otherwise great attractions. Colley Cibber loved to look in at Mrs. Booth's, to listen to Grace's well-told stories; Macklin went thither to tell his own to Grace, and John, Duke of Argyle, flitted about the same lady, for purposes of his own, which he had the honesty to give up, when Macklin informed him of the honorable interest he took in the friend of Mrs. Booth. Macklin