will not seem so strange that the receipts for the night were over seven thousand dollars. For this " great dramatic festival" at the Park, Forrest, Charles and Fanny Kemble, George Barrett, Cooper, and J. W. Wallack, among others, volunteered.

The failure of the Boston benefit of the following spring to equal anything like New York's record in receipts was very likely due in large measure to the fact that a pretty poor bill was offered for the very high prices charged.1 In New Orleans, where Payne was given a benefit in 1835 at the Camp Street Theatre (Tyrone Power being one of the actors of the occasion), the receipts were $1006.50.

This New Orleans benefit marks Payne's last association with the drama in America. He subsequently served his country as an intermediary in claim settlements with the Indians, and from 1843 to 1845 and again from 1851 until his death, April 9, 1852, as consul at Tunis. Nearly thirty years after his death his remains were carried from Tunis to America, through the friendly offices of W. W. Corcoran, and on a bright day of March, 1883, were deposited in Oak Hill Cemetery, Washington, as the assembled company sang together the immortal lines of "Home Sweet Home."

1 R. B. Forbes, in The Critic for December, 1882, describes this Boston fiasco as follows: "The eventful night came. In the second row appeared the committee and their families and friends en grand tenue, modestly giving up the dress circle to the sovereign people,' who were expected by thousands. In the lower part of the house appeared about two hundred editors, critics and boys eating peanuts. Finally, the curtain rose and four short plays were enacted, almost in pantomime, as no sane man could be expected to say much before so much light and so few persons. . . . This benefit was forever after known as the Festival of Pain."

CHAPTER IX

FORREST'S ENEMY, MACREADY, AND SOME STARS WHO

CAME AFTER HIM

THE Macready whose coming to America poor Conway had so dreaded opened at the Park Theatre, New York, as Virginius, October 2, 1826, played his great characters with much success in Boston, Philadelphia, and several other cities, and received for his efforts the tidy sum of two hundred and fifty dollars a night. William Charles Macready was an actor who knew his commercial value and seldom failed to get it. Forrest's violent disagreement with Macready and the riots which sprang therefrom are an old story to readers of theatrical memoirs, but it must be re-told here for the sake of record and completeness. The significant thing about the whole episode seems to be that though Forrest was thoroughly wrong in the matter, he, rather than Macready, gets our sympathy; there was something so outrageously smug and self-satisfied about this snobbish Englishman who despised his profession!

Moreover, everything except the approval of American audiences had gone Macready's way! The son of a celebrated county manager, he had had a very good education; and when a decline in the family fortunes

made it advisable for him to go on the stage, success there came quickly. At twenty-three he was playing good parts at Covent Garden for a salary of eighteen pounds a week, and the Hazlitt who lampooned poor Conway was praising him highly. Opportunity to

travel in France and Italy and to see the noted actors of both countries was then his; after which he made an advantageous marriage and set out to conquer America.

America duly conquered, Macready returned to England and was soon making an artistic, if not pecuniary, success of an English company which (in 1828) he took over to Paris. Then he became manager of the Covent Garden Theatre and proceeded to produce many of the original plays with which his fame is identified. When he made his second visit to America, in 1843, he was manager of Drury Lane Theatre. This time he stayed with us over a year, and while in New York was the guest of the Forrests.

Macready's third and last American engagement began in September, 1848. His career was now, at any rate, to be marked by thunder-clouds, as he very soon discovered. For the idol of the American "People," Edwin Forrest, had not been given a fair hearing in London, and Philadelphia, the city of Forrest's birth, promptly let Macready know that he was held responsible for this. When he performed "Macbeth" he had to do it almost in dumb show, amidst occasional showers of nuts and rotten eggs; but he played through the part and at the end addressed the audience, pledging his

sacred word of honour that he had never shown any hostility to "an American actor." This called forth a public letter from Forrest, in which he confessed boastfully to having hissed Macready at Edinburgh but denied any part in the organized opposition which had been shown the visitor; he added, with superfluous offensiveness, that his advice had been to let " the superannuated driveller alone." In New York Macready was again the victim of a conspiracy, one of his staff, Mr. John Ryder, having been offered, as was later shown, a large bribe to come forward and swear falsely that Macready had conspired to render Forrest a failure in England. Of course the offer was indignantly refused. All the betterclass opinion of New York was with the visiting star; but, none the less, rowdyism prevailed.

A plan for hissing Macready from the stage, upon his appearance in New York, had been submitted to Forrest. The latter refused, of course, to countenance the conspiracy. But this did not prevent the theatre from being crowded with the Englishman's enemies when, on May 7, 1849, he began his engagement at the Astor Place Opera House. The play was obliged to proceed amid a tumult of yells and hisses, and at the end of the third act the performance stopped, and the visiting star returned to his hotel. His desire was to set sail at once for England, but in response to the urgent wishes of his friends he agreed to make one more attempt to play, and on May 10 "Macbeth" was advertised.

Upon the opening of the doors that night, the theatre filled almost instantly with people who were favourable