an exception. The idea of the buckish country pettifogger was original; we trust Mr. Dibdin will not abandon this character. In the present piece it is a mere sketch. The country waiter was very good, and the landlady not amiss.

The chief merit of this piece, however, was the dialogue, with a few exceptions as to the puns. The first scene in the second act, in which Spitia ridicules some modern fashions, particularly that of Egyptian furniture, was written with a true spirit of wit and vivacity, which would have done honour to any writer of the age.

The piece was well supported by the performers, and warmly received by the audience. Among the performers we have chiefly to notice Mrs. Litchfield, who may be said to have done more than justice for the author. Mathews was excellent; and dressed his character most admirably. Mr. Young appeared to no advantage; the part was unsuited to him, and had little effect.

tone of irony, leaving the joke and the laugh to the audience, he very kindly conducted them to it by his own grimace, and spluttered and gabbled through his part, as if it had been Ollapod or Caleb Quotem. The humour of Puff is too refined for the comic habits of Fawcett.

Mathews's Sir Fretful Plagiary was admirable; it was most successfully drest; his affected candour had a very fine tone of hypocrisy ; his petulance and impatience were given with the most inimitable exterior gesture; in a word, Mathews, in this character, was not inferior to Parsons himself. Dangle and Sneer were both mediocre. Mrs. Liston, in Tilburina, was excellent, and Waddy was a good representative of the mute Lord Burleigh.

The piece was well received, and continues to

attract.

ON THE

An airy, spirited Epilogue was delivered by Mrs. STRUCTURE OF OUR THEATRES. Litchfield, in a manner which procured her general applause.

Mr Sheridan's dramatic satire, The Critic, has been revived at this theatre. It has been a good deal anticipated in its effect by Tom Thumb, a piece which, without the ostentation of criticism, or any grave attempt to expose the faults of dramatic composition by means of ridicule, is invariably diverting by the vivacity of its burlesque and the pleasant originality of its caricature.

The Rehearsal was of that class of plays which Aristotle might have written,-criticism thrown into a dramatic form, and familiarised and invigorated by stage examples; Tom Thumb might have been the combination of Aristophanes and Plautus; but the Critic has all the grace and elegance of Horace, with the addition of that humour so peculiar to English writers.

MR. EDITOR,

THE strictures in my first letter were confined to the shape of the house, or part allotted to the spectators; the remarks in my second epistle had for their object the disposition of the prosce- \ nium, or intermediate space between the house and the stage; the observations of this my third serawl will entirely relate to the arrangement of the stage itself.

With regard to this latter part of our theatrical structures, allow me to begin by observing that our nation, which perhaps makes a more dex. terous and more extensive use of machinery than any other, in the production and improvement of objects of direct u'ility and comfort, seems to avail itself less than any other, of the powers of mechanism, in the promotion and the perfecting of instruments and means of mere diversion and show.

Notwithstanding the value of this piece, it is better in the closet than on the stage. The ma- In the great Italian and French theatres, every jority of an audience understand nothing of cri- change of scenery, however extensive its whole, ticism. They judge of good or bad writings only and however complicated its parts, is entirely acby effect; they laugh at a thing decidedly ridi- complished by means of machinery. The turnculous, without any help from critical sagacity, ing of one single wheel effects at once, both the or application of the joke beyond its present ob- simultaneous retreat of the entire assemblage of ject. When Burleigh shakes his head and makes wings and drops and flat, that are to disappear, his exit, the laugh is at the actor's grimace; the and the simultaneous advancement of the entire satire on the stiff and empty courtier of modern set of lateral and top and back scenes, that are tragedy is perceived, and relished but by few. to come forward in their place: so that the For stage effect, therefore, Tom Thumb is much deepest forest or garden scene is, as if by masuperior to the Critic-Its satire is of a very dif-gic, in a twinkling, converted into a street or ferent value and kind. The Haymarket company is not quite strong enough to do justice to this piece. Fawcett was the Puff; but he was not solemn nor dry enough for the impostor. Instead of delivering the dialogue in a grave and serious

palace.

In the English playhouses, on the contrary, every change of scenery (if we except a few of those very confined and partial transfigurations of our Harlequinades, termed Pantomimes) is at

chieved by dint of hands; and, whether the action lie in Peru or in China, in ancient Greece or modern London, whenever the scene is to be shifted, out pop a parcel of fellows in ragged laced liveries, to announce the event, and to bring it about by mere manual labour. They are not only distinctly heard, giving each other directions to that purpose, to the unspeakable annoyance of the actor, whom they perhaps outbellow in some of his finest passages-but they are even distinctly seen, tugging and pulling piecemeal at each different piece of the scenery: of these various divisions some hitch, others tumble; here a wing comes rolling on the stage before its time, there another lags behind until perhaps the time for a new removal is arrived: and thus does every one of those changes of decoration, so frequent in English plays, only present a scene of confusion, most distressing to the eye.

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be supposed to lead to different distinct contiguous apartments, it has as many more additional doors as there are supposed to be such apartments, each contrived in some one of the wings that line the sides of the stage. This practice not only increases the illusion of the scene, but, what is still more material, renders much easier the understanding of the plot: not to speak of the infinitely more striking effect which is produced by a performer of a commanding mien, and invested with a dignified character, entering the scene at the centre, and from his very first appearance presenting himself in front to the spectators, than when obliged to slide edgeways on and off the boards, through an interstice in the side scenes.

In England there hardly ever is a central door, contrived in the flat which closes the scene: Whatever be the performance, and whoever be the personages, they all either walk in and out at the permanent doors, which form part of the proscenium; and, which, as I have already observed, offer in their architecture and decoration no harmony or connection whatever with the peculiar scenery or event exhibited; or they slide in and out, between the intervals of the wings, which are generally intended to represent a solid cohering wall; so that, were the laws of perspective sufficiently attended to, in the painting of the scenes, to render the separation between their different divisions as imperceptible as it ought to be, and to make them look like an uninterrupted mass of masonry, the entrée and the exit of each personage athwart this solid wall, would every time appear effected by downright witchcraft.

I shall not expatiate at length, on the constant violation of those laws of perspective, which ough to make the whole range of wings and drops and flat, one single cohering body; or on the equally constant disregard of those rules of congruity, which should render every one of these different component parts of the same whole, subservient to an uniform style of architecture and of decoration. Suffice it to say, that this violation and this disregard of the most essential conditions of theatrical illusion are carried in England to the highest pitch. Instead of fitting to each other's extremities with nicety, the wings and drops often encroach upon each other's boundaries in such a way as to occasion, in the different objects which they represent, the most unsightly maimings and breaks: and not unfrequently is the roof of the humblest hovel lost in the tattered sky. For the most part, the wings, neither in the style, nor in the propor-niture, disposed all around, and ready for the tions, nor in the perspective of their architecture, correspond at all with the flat with which they are associated; and between the extreme shallowness of these wings, and the excessive width of the intervening spaces between them, half the audience is treated, in all our playhouses, with a full view, not only of the premeditated and full dress play, acted before the scenes, but of the extempore and undress play, going for. ward behind the stage, to the utter destruction of all illusion, decorum, and pleasure!

On the French stage, whenever the scene represents a room, particular attention is given to the making that room appear habitable and inhabited. It always displays in the very centre of the flat or closing part, its own appropriate folding door, at which the dramatis personæ usually go in and out; and if, from the peculiar texture of the play exhibited, this room should

In French scenery, a room, represented as inhabited, always is made to display a few chairs, and other pieces of appropriate fur

performers to help themselves to, when required: nor, if, in the play that is acting, a dialogue between two seated personages, should not be intended to take place, until, perhaps, near the very conclusion of the scene, would a couple of the gentlemen in laced liveries aforementioned, as if endowed with the gift of second sight from the very rising of the curtain, lug two lumbering arm chairs to the very centre of the in all other respects totally unfurnished boards; there to remain, staring the spectators full in the face, during the whole of the ensuing scene, in order to give them timely intimation of a conversation, which, perhaps, the author has been torturing his wits to represent as an unpremeditated and spontaneous effusion, resulting from the most unforeseen concurrence of incidents.

A. Zo