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 of skillfully elaborating his material is sufficiently evidenced, should close abruptly just when the sources of its interest were becoming wider and fuller.

But any loss from this cause of amusing anecdotes or graphic descriptions of persons or scenes is more than made good by the far higher value and stronger attraction of the book as the portraiture of a striking character and a remarkable career.  In this view the Diaries are not inferior in interest to the expanded narrative that precedes them.  Indeed, terse and concise as they generally are, they have the advantage of presenting freshly and vividly the impressions and reflections of the moment, and thus exhibiting the writer’s mind both in its habitual and exceptional states without reservation or deliberate purpose.  They do not, however, reveal any different image from that which is presented in the autobiography:  on the contrary, they confirm the truthfulness and frank fidelity of the more conscious self-delineation which is there attempted.  There breathes, indeed, through the whole book a tone of unaffected sincerity, the charm of which cannot be overrated.  Not only does every statement bear the stamp of veracity, but there is an utter absence of artifice, of any design, so to speak, upon the reader, which is as rare as it is beautiful.  Admiration and sympathy were needs of Macready’s nature, but he will have no jot of them beyond what he can fairly and honorably claim.  Least of all, will he exalt himself at the expense of others.  He pays no idle compliments, pours out no fulsome or insidious eulogies, but he speaks of his rivals and his predecessors with the warm appreciation of one who had felt the full influence of their power, and who could never look on merit with an oblique eye.  His worship of Mrs. Siddons, as unparalleled in her