LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
Macready's Reminiscences, and Selections from his Diaries and Letters.
Edited by Sir Frederick Pollock, Bart., one of his Executors. New
York: Macmillan & Co.
It is probable that this book will excite a degree of disappointment
in many readers, who, knowing Macready's position outside his
profession, may naturally have expected to find in the record of his
life ample and interesting details of his intercourse, often amounting
to intimacy, with a great number of notable persons. This expectation
would without doubt have been gratified had the autobiography, which
occupies a third of the volume and covers about the same proportion of
the writer's theatrical career, been carried to its close. Macready
was not one of those men who spring to eminence at a bound: his powers
were gradually and slowly developed, and owing partly to this fact,
but partly also to unfavorable circumstances, the recognition of them
was tardy and grudging. For many years after his _debut_ on the London
boards he, who at a later period was almost disparaged as a
pre-eminently intellectual actor, owed his chief successes to his
performance of melodramatic parts like Rob Roy and William Tell, for
which his mental as well as physical endowments were considered
especially to qualify him.
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