nces, 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. When at length he had reached his full
maturity, he stood without a living rival as the representative of
leading Shakespearian characters; and maintaining this supremacy down
to his retirement from the stage, closed the line of great tragedians
and left a place which after the lapse of a quarter of a century still
remains unfilled. His high personal worth and his efforts to exalt and
purify the drama won him golden opinions from all sorts of men; and,
with the exception of Garrick, no actor probably ever mingled as
largely or came into as close relations with persons distinguished in
other and alien walks of life. Mere fashionable society he seems never
to have frequented, and his labors were too pressing and onerous to
allow of that continuous companionship with a chosen circle in which
men of letters or of science, however industrious, are generally able
to find relaxation. But he came in contact, at one time or another,
with most of the celebrated people of his day on both sides of the
Atlantic, his friendship was sought and prized by many of them, and
the occasional glimpses we get of them in his _Diaries_ are of a kind
to deepen our regret that the _Reminiscences_, in which the power