LOVEGROVE in Justice Clack? his childish treble still pipes in our ears: "Whip 'em, whip 'em, whip 'em." DoWTON was the representative of the Justice the other night, and shook our ribs most incontinently. He was in "excellent foolery," and our lungs crowed chanticleer. Yet it appears to us, that there was a still higher strain of fatuity in his predecessor-that his eyes distilled a richer dotage. Perhaps after all it was an error of the memory. Defunct merit comes out upon us strangely.

Easy natural WRENCH was the Springlove; too comfortable a personage perhaps to personify Springlove, in whom the voice of the bird awakens a restless instinct of roaming that had slept during the winter. Miss STEVENSON certainly leaves us nothing to regret for the absence of the Lady, however agreeable, who formerly performed the part of Meriel. Miss STEVENSON is a fine opencountenanced lass, with glorious girlish manners. But the Princess of Mumpers, and Lady Paramount, of beggarly counterfeit accents, was she that played Rachel. Her gabbling lachrymose petitions; her tones, such as we have heard by the side of old woods, when an irresistible face has come peeping on one on a sudden; with her full black locks, and a voice-how shall we describe it ?-a voice that was by nature meant to convey nothing but truth and goodness, but warped by circumstance into an assurance that she is telling us a lie that catching twitch of the thievish irreproveable finger-those ballad-singers' notes, so vulgar, yet so unvulgar-that assurance, so like impudence, and yet so many countless leagues removed from it-her jeers, which we had rather stand, than be caressed with others ladies' compliments, a summer's day long-her face, with a wild out-of-door's grace upon it

Altogether, a brace of more romantic she-beggars it was never our fortune to meet in this supplicatory world. The youngest might have sate for "pretty Bessy," whose father was an Earl, and whose legend still adorns the front of mine Hostess's doors at Bethnal-Green; and the other could be no less than the " Beggar "What a lass that were,' Maid" whom "King Cophetua wooed." said a stranger who sate beside us, speaking of Miss KELLY in Rachel, "to go a gipseying through the world with." We confess we longed to drop a tester in her lap, she begged so masterly.

By the way, this is the true Beggar's Opera. The other should have been called the Mirror for Highwaymen. We wonder the Societies for the Suppression of Mendicity (and other good things) do not club for the putting down of this infamous protest in favour of air, and clear liberty, and honest license, and blameless assertion of man's original blest charter of blue skies, and vagrancy, and nothing-to-do.

III.-ISAAC BICKERSTAFF'S "HYPOCRITE"

(1819)

By one of those strange perversities which actuate poor mortals in the place of motives (to persuade us into the notion that we are free agents, we presume), we had never till the other evening seen DoWTON in Doctor Cantwell. By a pious fraud of Mr. ARNOLD'S, who, by a process as simple as some of those by which MATHEWS metamorphoses his person, has converted the play into an opera,a conversion, by the way, for which we are highly indebted to him, -we have been favoured with this rich novelty at our favourite theatre. It seems a little unreasonable to come lagging in with a posthumous testimony to the merits of a performance of which the town has long rung, but we cannot help remarking in Mr. DoWTON'S acting, the subtil gradations of the hypocrisy; the length to which it runs in proportion as the recipient is capable of taking it in; the gross palpable way in which he administers the dose in wholesale to old Lady Lambert, that rich fanatic; the somewhat more guarded manner in which he retails it out, only so much at a time as he can bear, to the somewhat less bitten fool her son; and the almost absence of it, before the younger members of the family, when nobody else is by: how the cloven foot peeps out a little and a little more, till the diabolical nature is stung out at last into full manifestation of its horrid self. What a grand insolence in the tone which he assumes, when he commands Sir John to quit his house! and then the tortures and agonies when he is finally baffled! It is in these last perhaps that he is greatest, and we should be doing injustice not to compare this part of the performance with, and in some respects to give it the preference above, the acting of Mr. KEAN in a situation nearly analogous, at the conclusion of the City Madam. Cantwell reveals his pangs with quite as much force, and without the assistance of those contortions which transform the detected Luke into the similitude of a mad tiger, or a foaming demon. DowTON plays it neither like beast nor demon, but simply as it should be, a bold bad man pushed to extremity. Humanity is never once overstepped. Has it ever been noticed, the exquisite modulation with which he drawls out the word CHARLES, when he calls his secretary, so humble, so seraphic, so resigned. The most diabolical of her sex that we ever knew accented all her honey devil words in just such a hymn-like smoothness. The spirit of WHITFIELD seems hovering in the air, to suck in the blessed tones, so much like his own upon earth: Lady HUNTINGDON claps her neat white wings, and gives it out again in heaven to the sainted ones, in approbation. Miss KELLY is not quite at home in Charlotte; she is too good for such parts. Her cue is to be natural; she cannot put on the

pur

modes of artificial life, and play the coquet as it is expected to be played. There is a frankness in her tones which defeats her poses: we could not help wondering why her lover (Mr. PEARMAN) looked so rueful; we forgot that she was acting airs and graces, as she seemed to forget it herself, turning them into a playfulness which could breed no doubt for a moment which way her inclinations ran. She is in truth not framed to tease or torment even in jest, but to utter a hearty Yes or No; to yield or refuse assent with a noble sincerity. We have not the pleasure of being acquainted with her, but we have been told that she carries the same cordial manners into private life. We have heard, too, of some virtues which she is in the practice of; but they are of a description which repay themselves, and with them neither we nor the public have any thing to do.

One word about WRENCH, who played the Colonel :-Was this man never unhappy? It seems as if care never came near him, as if the black ox could never tread upon his foot; we want something calamitous to befal him, to bring him down to us. It is a shame he should be suffered to go about with his well-looking happy face and tones, insulting us thin race of irritable and irritable-making critics.

IV. NEW PIECES AT THE LYCEUM
(1819)

A plot has broke out at this theatre. Some quarrel has been breeding between the male and female performers, and the women have determined to set up for themselves. Seven of them, Belles without Beaux they call themselves, have undertaken to get up a piece without any assistance from the men, and in our opinion have established their point most successfully. There is Miss CAREW with her silvery tones, and Miss STEVENSON with her delicious mixture of the school-girl and the waiting-maid, and Miss KELLY sure to be first in any mischief, and Mrs. CHATTERLY with some of the best acting we have ever witnessed, and Miss Love, worthy of the name, and Mrs. GROVE that rhymes to her, and Mrs. RICHARDSON who might in charity have been allowed somewhat a larger portion of the dialogue. The effect was enchanting. We mean, for once. We do not want to encourage these Amazonian vanities. Once or twice we longed to have WRENCH bustling among them. A lady who sate near us was observed to gape for want of variety. To us it was delicate quintessence, an apple-pye made all of quinces. We remember poor HOLCROFT's last Comedy, which positively died from the opposite excess; it was choked up with men, and perished from a redundancy of male population. It had nine principal men characters in it, and but one woman, and she of

no very ambiguous character. Mrs. HARLOW, to do the part justice, chose to play it in scarlet.

We did not know Mrs. CHATTERLY's merits before; she plays, with downright sterling good acting, a prude who is to be convinced out of her prudery by Miss KELLY'S (we did not catch her stagename) assumption of the dress and character of a brother of seventeen, who makes the prettiest unalarming Platonic approaches; and in the shyest mask of moral battery, no one step of which you can detect, or say this is decidedly going too far, vanquishes at last the ice of her scruples, brings her into an infinite scrape, and then with her own infinite good humour sets all to right, and brings her safe out of it again with an explanation. Mrs. CHATTERLY's embarrassments were masterly. Miss STEVENSON her maid's start, at surprising a youth in her mistress's closet at midnight, was quite as good. Miss KELLY we do not care to say any thing about, because we have been accused of flattering her. The truth is, this lady puts so much intelligence and good sense into every part which she plays, that there is no expressing an honest sense of her merits, without incurring a suspicion of that sort. But what have we to gain by praising Miss KELLY?

Altogether this little feminine republic, this provoking experiment, went off most smoothly. What a nice world it would be, we sometimes think, all women! but then we are afraid we slip in a fallacy unawares into the hypothesis; we somehow edge in the idea of ourselves as spectators or something among them.

We saw WILKINSON after it in Walk for a Wager. What a picture of Forlorn Hope! of abject orphan destitution! he seems to have no friends in the world but his legs, and he plies them accordingly. He goes walking on like a perpetual motion. His continual ambulatory presence performs the part of a Greek chorus. He is the walking Gentleman of the piece; a Peripatetic that would make a Stoic laugh. He made us cry. His Muffincap in Amateurs and Actors is just such another piece of acting. We have seen charity boys, both of St. Clement's and Farringdon without, looking just as old, ground down out of all semblance of youth, by abject and hopeless neglect-you cannot guess their age between fifteen and fifty. If Mr. PEAK is the author of these pieces, he has no reason to be piqued at their reception.

We must apologize for an oversight in our last week's article. The allusion made to Mr. KEAN'S acting of Luke in the City Madam was totally inapplicable to the part and to the play. We were thinking of his performance of the concluding scenes of the New Way to Pay Old Debts. We confounded one of MASSINGER'S strange heroes with the other. It was Sir Giles Overreach we meant; nor are we sure that our remark was just, even with this

explanation. When we consider the intense tone, in which Mr. KEAN thinks it proper (and he is quite as likely to be in the right as his blundering critic) to pitch the temperament of that monstrous character from the beginning, it follows but logically and naturally, that where the wild uncontrollable man comes to be baffled of his purpose, his passions should assume a frenzied manner, which it was altogether absurd to expect should be the same with the manner of the cautious and self-restraining Cantwell, even when he breaks loose from all bonds in the agony of his final exposure. We never felt more strongly the good sense of the saying,-Comparisons are odious. They betray us not seldom into bitter errors of judgment; and sometimes, as in the present instance, into absolute matter of fact blunders. But we have recanted.

FOUR REVIEWS

(1819-1820)

I.-FALSTAFF'S LETTERS

(1819)

Original Letters, &c., of Sir John Falstaff and his Friends; now first made public by a Gentleman, a descendant of Dame Quickly, from genuine MSS. which have been in the possession of the Quickly Family near four hundred years. London: Robinsons, 1796

A

COPY of this work sold at the Roxburgh sale for five guineas. We have both before and since that time picked it up at stalls for eighteen pence. Reader, if you shall ever light upon a copy in the same way, we counsel you to buy it. We are deceived if there be not in it much of the true Shakspearian stuff. We present you with a few of the Letters, which may speak for themselves :

FALSTAFF TO THE PRINCE

“I pr'ythee, Hal, lend me thy 'kerchief. An thy unkindness have not started more salt gouts down my poor old cheek, than my good rapier hath of blood from foemen's gashes in five and thirty years' service, then am I a very senseless mummy. I squander away in drinkings monies belonging to the soldiery! I do deny it -they have had part-the surplus is gone in charity-accuse the