friend Macready, and the friendship between author and actor
continued. Sheridan Knowles had a kindly simplicity of character,
and the two qualities for which an actor most prizes a dramatist,
skill in providing opportunities for acting that will tell, and
readiness to make any changes that the actor asks for. The
postscript to his first letter to Macready was, "Make any
alterations you like in any part of the play, and I shall be obliged
to you." When he brought to the great actor his play of William
Tell--Caius Gracchus had been produced in November, 1823--there were
passages of writing in it that stopped the course of action, and,
says Macready, "Knowles had less of the tenacity of authorship than
most writers," so that there was no difficulty about alterations,
Macready having in a very high degree the tenacity of actorship.
And so, in 1825, Tell became another of Macready's best successes.

Sheridan Knowles continued to write for the stage until 1845, when
he was drawn wholly from the theatre by a religious enthusiasm that
caused him, in 1851, to essay the breaking of a lance with Cardinal
Wiseman on the subject of Transubstantiation. Sir Robert Peel gave
ease to his latter days by a pension of 200 pounds a year from the
Civil List, which he had honourably earned by a career as dramatist,
in which he sought to appeal only to the higher sense of literature,
and to draw enjoyment from the purest source. Of his plays time two
comedies {1} here given are all that have kept their place upon the
stage. As one of the most earnest dramatic writers of the present
century he is entitled to a little corner in our memory. Worse work
of the past has lasted longer than the plays of Sheridan Knowles are
likely to last through the future.

H. M.