"the

Knowles owes every thing that an author can owe to the actors; and they owed every thing to their attention to truth and to real feeling. Mr. Macready's Virginius is his best and most faultless performance, -at once the least laboured and the most effectual. His fine, manly voice sends forth soothing, impassioned tones, that seem to linger round, or burst with terrific grandeur from the home of his heart. Mr. Kemble's Icilius was heroic, spirited, fervid, the Roman warrior and lover: and Miss Foote was freeborn Roman maid," with a little bit, a delightful little bit, of the English school-girl in her acting. We incline to the ideal of our own country-women, after all, when they are so young, so innocent, so handsome. We are both pleased and sorry to hear a report which threatens us with the loss of so great a favourite; and one chief source of our regret will be, that she will no longer play Virginia. The scenery allotted to this tragedy encumbered the stage, and the simplicity of the play. Temples and pictured monuments adorned the scene, which were not in existence till five hundred years after the date of the story; and the ruins of the Capitol, of Constantine's arch, and the temple of Jupiter Stator, frowned at once on the death of Virginia, and the decline and fall of the Roman empire. As to the dresses, we leave them to our deputy of the ward

robe but, we believe, they were got right at last, with some trouble. In the printed play, we observe a number of passages marked with inverted commas, which are omitted in the representation. This is the case almost uniformly wherever the words "Tyranny," or "Liberty," occur. Is this done by authority, or is it prudence in the author, "lest the

courtiers offended should be ?"

Is the name of

Liberty to be struck out of the English language, and are we not to hate tyrants even in an old Roman play? "Let the galled jade wince our withers are unwrung." We turn to a pleasanter topic, and are glad to find an old and early friend unaltered in sentiment as he is unspoiled by success :the same boy-poet, after a lapse of years, as when we first knew him; unconscious of the wreath he has woven round his brow, laughing and talking of his play just as if it had been written by any body else, and as simple-hearted, downright, and honest as the unblemished work he has produced !*

* Generosity and simplicity are not the characteristic virtues of poets. It has been disputed whether "an honest man is the noblest work of God." But we think an honest poet is so.

NEW ENGLISH OPERA HOUSE;

FARREN.

-INEXPEDIENCY OF MANY THEATRES TERRY.-JONES. TOKELY.-LISTON.*

It is now the middle of July, when we are by turns drenched with showers and scorched with sun-beams; the winter theatres are closed, and the summer ones have just opened, soon to close again

Like marigolds with the sun's eye.

We are not, however, in the number of those who deprecate the shortness of the summer season, as one of the miseries of human life, or who think little theatres better than big. We like a play-house in proportion to the number of happy human faces it contains (and a play-house seldom contains many wretched ones)—and again, we like a play best when we do not see the faces of the actors too near. We do not want to be informed, as at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, that part of the rich humour of Mr. Liston's face arises from his having lost a tooth in front, nor to see Mr. Jones's eyes roll more meteor* July, 1820:

ous than ever. At the larger theatres we only discover that the ladies paint red at the smaller ones we can distinguish when they paint white. We see defects enough at a distance, and we can always get near enough (in the pit) to see the beauties. Those who go to the boxes do not go to see the play, but to make a figure, and be thought something of themselves (so far they probably succeed, at least in their own opinion): and if the Gods cannot hear, they make themselves heard. We do not like private theatricals. We like every thing to be what it is. We have no fancy for seeing the actors look like part of the audience, nor for seeing the pit invade the boxes, nor the boxes shake hands with the galleries. We are for a proper distinction of ranks-at the theatre. While we are laughing at the broad farcical humour of the Agreeable Surprise, or critically examining Mrs. Mardyn's dress in the Will, we do not care to be disturbed by some idle whisper, or mumbling disapprobation of an old beau, or antiquated dowager in a high head-dress, close at our ear, but in a different part of the house.-Mr. Arnold has taken care of this at the New English Opera-house in the Strand, of which he is proprietor and patentee. The "Great Vulgar and the Small" (as Cowley has it) are there kept at a respectful distance. The boxes are perched up so high above the pit, that it

gives you a head-ache to look up at the beauty and fashion that nightly adorn them with their thin and scattered constellations; and then the gallery is "raised so high above all height," it is nearly impossible for the eye to scale it, while a little miserable shabby upper-gallery is partitioned off with an iron railing, through which the poor one-shilling devils look like half-starved prisoners in the Fleet, and are a constant butt of ridicule to the genteeler rabble beneath them. Then again (so vast is Mr. Arnold's genius for separating and combining), you have a saloon, a sweet pastoral retreat, where any love-sick melancholy swain, or romantic nymph, may take a rural walk to Primrose-hill, or Chalk-farm, by the side of painted purling streams, and sickly flowering shrubs, without once going out of the walls of the theatre:

Such tricks hath strong Imagination!

If the Haymarket has been praised by a contemporary critic (of whom we might say, that he is alter et idem) for being as hot as an oven in the midst of the dog-days, the Lyceum, on the other hand, is as cool as a well; and much might, we think, be said on both sides. As a matter of taste, or fancy, or prejudice (we shall not pretend to say which), we do not greatly like the New English Opera-house. The