Mr. Macready, the eminent actor and greater manager. who restored
the taste for the Shakespearian drama in London some thirty odd years ago, died last Sunday at Cheltenham, at the age of eighty. We should hardly call him a really great actor. In tragedy he was stiff and tended to be stilted, and no one who had ever seen him in perhaps his worst part,—Othello,—would give him credit for rendering genuine passion well ; but he had dignity, and when the part itself had in it a flavour of artificial grandeur, as in Lord Lytton's Richelieu, for example, his acting was often masterly. Ile flourished somewhat before the taste for realism which has so transformed English Art, had set in, and he always seemed, to the present editor at least, to succeed better in dignified comedy than in tragedy. What he wanted was passion and ease.
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