two Miss Halfords in the characters of Rosina and Phoebe. They have both of them succeeded and equally well. If they are not a pair of Sirens, they are very pretty singers. Miss E. Halford is the tallest, and Miss S. Halford the fattest of the two.]

THE RECRUITING OFFICER.

[Drury Lane] March 3, 1816.

FARQUHAR'S Comedy of The Recruiting Officer was revived at Drury-Lane Theatre on Tuesday,' when Mrs. Mardyn appeared as Sylvia. She looked very charmingly in it while she continued in her female dress, and displayed some good acting, particularly in the scene where Plume gives her his will to read; but we did not like her at all as Young Wilful, with her jockey coat, breeches, and boots. Her dress seemed as if contrived on purpose to hide the beauties of her natural shape, and discover its defects. A woman in Hessian boots can no more move gracefully under such an additional and unusual incumbrance to her figure, than a man could with a clog round each leg. We hope that she will re-cast her male attire altogether, it she has not already done it. The want of vivacity and elegance in her appearance gave a flatness to the latter part of the comedy, which was not relieved by the circumstance of Mr. Rae's forgetting his part. We do not think he played the airy, careless, lively Captain Plume well; and Mr. Harley did not play Captain Brazen, but Sergeant Brazen. Johnstone's Sergeant Kite was not very happy. Johnstone's impudence is good-humoured and natural, Sergeant Kite's is knavish impudence. Johnstone is not exactly fitted for any character the failings of which do not lean to February 10. Miss E. Halford was Rosina and Miss S. Halford Phoebe.

2

the amiable side. There was one speech which entirely suited him, and that was where he says to his Captain, “The mob are so pleased with your Honour, and the justices and better sort of people are so delighted with me, that we shall soon do our business!"1 Munden's Costar Pearmain, and Knight's Thomas Appletree, were a double treat. Knight's fixed, rivetted look at the guinea, accompanied with the exclamation, "Oh, the wonderful works of Nature!" and Munden's open-mouthed, reeling wonder, were in the best style of broad comic acting. If any thing, this scene was even surpassed by that in which Munden, after he has 'listed with Plume, makes his approximations to his friend, who is whimpering, and casting at him a most inviting ogle, with an expression of countenance all over oily and lubricated, emphatically ejaculates, "Well, Tummy!" We have no wish to see better acting than this. This actor has won upon our good opinion, and we here retract openly all that we have said disrespectfully of his talents, generally speaking.* Miss Kelly's Rose was played con amore; it was an exquisite exhibition of rustic naïveté. Her riding on the basket as a side-saddle, was very spirited and well contrived. Passion expresses itself in such characters by a sort of uneasy bodily vivacity, which no actress gives so well as Miss Kelly. We ought not to omit, that she cries her chickens in a good shrill housewifely market-voice, as if she would drive a good bargain with them.5 Mr. Powell played Justice Balance as well as if he had been the Justice himself.

3

The Recruiting Officer is not one of Farquhar's best comedies, though it is lively and entertaining. It contains merely sketches of characters, and the conclusion of the plot is rather lame. He informs us in the dedication to the published play, that it was founded on some local and personal circumstances that happened in Shropshire, where he 2 Ibid., II, iii.

1 Recruiting Officer, I, i.

3 "Well, Tummas!"-Ibid., II, iii. 4 See ante, p. 77.

was a recruiting officer, and it seems not unlikely that most of the scenes actually took place near the foot of the Wrekin.

[The new farce of What Next?1 is very broad, very improbable, but if better managed might have been made very laughable. The plot turns entirely on the disguise assumed by a nephew to personate his uncle, which leads to several ridiculous surprises and blunders, and the carrying on and the disentangling of the plot is effected with much more violence than art. It was once or twice in danger, but it hurried on so rapidly from absurdity to absurdity, that it at last distanced the critics. Even as a farce, it is too crude and coarse ever to become a very great favourite.]

THE FAIR PENITENT.2

Covent-Garden, March 10, 1816.

THE FAIR PENITENT is a tragedy which has been found fault with both on account of its poetry and its morality. Notwithstanding these objections, it still holds possession of the stage, where morality is not very eagerly sought after, and poetry but imperfectly understood. We conceive, that for every purpose of practical criticism, that is a good tragedy which draws tears without moving laughter. Rowe's play is founded on one of Massinger's, The Fatal Dowry, in which the characters are a good deal changed, and the interest not increased. The genius of Rowe was slow and timid, and loved the ground: he had not "a Muse of fire to ascend the brightest heaven of invention: "3 but he had art and judgment enough to accommodate the more daring flights of a ruder age to the polished well-bred mediocrity of the age he

1 By T. Dibdin, produced February 29. Dowton was Col. Touchwood, and Bartley, his nephew, Major Touchwood.

2 Revived March 2.

3 Henry V, prologue 1, 2.

lived in. We may say of Rowe as Voltaire said of Racine: "All his lines are equally good." The compliment is after all equivocal; but it is one which may be applied generally to all poets, who in their productions are always thinking of what they shall say, and of what others have said, and who are never hurried into excesses of any kind, good or bad, by trusting implicitly to the impulse of their own genius or of the subject. The excellent author of Tom Jones, in one of his introductory chapters,' represents Rowe as an awkward imitator of Shakespeare. He was rather an imitator of the style and tone of sentiment of that age-a sort of modernizer of antiquity. The character of Calista is quite in the bravura style of Massinger. She is a heroine, a virago, fair, a woman of high spirit and violent resolutions, any thing but a penitent. She dies indeed at last, not from remorse for her vices, but because she can no longer gratify them. She has not the slightest regard for her virtue, and not much for her reputation; but she would brand with scorn, and blast with the lightning of her indignation, the friend who wishes to stop her in the career of her passions in order to save her from destruction and infamy. She has a strong sentiment of respect and attachment to her father, but she will sooner consign his grey hairs to shame and death than give up the least of her inclinations, or sacrifice her sullen gloom to the common decencies of behaviour. She at last pretends conversion from her errors, in a soft whining address to her husband, and after having deliberately and wantonly done all the mischief in her power, with her eyes open, wishes that she had sooner known better, that she might have acted differently! We do not however for ourselves object to the morality of all this: for we apprehend that morality is little more than truth; and we think that Rowe has given a very true and striking picture of the nature and consequences of

2

1 FIELDING'S Tom Jones, Book IX, chap. i (vol. i, p. 462, Bohn's edit.).

2 Fair Penitent, V.

that wilful selfishness of disposition, which "to be hated needs but to be seen." We do not think it necessary that the spectator should wait for the reluctant conversion of the character itself, to be convinced of its odiousness or folly, or that the only instruction to be derived from the drama is, not from the insight it gives us into the nature of human character and passion, but from some artificial piece of patchwork morality tacked to the end. However, Rowe has so far complied with the rules.

After what we have said of the character of Calista, Miss O'Neill will perhaps excuse us if we do not think that she was a very perfect representative of it. The character, as she gave it, was a very fine and impressive piece of acting, but it was not quite Calista. She gave the pathos, but not the spirit of the character. Her grief was sullen and sad, not impatient and ungovernable. Calista's melancholy is not a settled dejection, but a feverish state of agitation between conflicting feelings. Her eyes should look bright and sparkling through her tears. Her action should be animated and aspiring. Her present woes should not efface the traces of past raptures. There should be something in her appearance of the intoxication of pleasure, mixed with the madness of despair. The scene in which Miss O'Neill displayed most power, was that in which she is shown her letter to Lothario by Horatio, her husband's friend. The rage and shame with which her bosom seemed labouring were truly dreadful. This is the scene in which the poet has done most for the imagination, and it is the characteristic excellence of Miss O'Neill's acting that it always rises with the expectations of the audience. She also repeated the evasive answer, ""Tis the day in which my father gave my hand to Altamont—as such I will remember it for ever,' "3 in a tone of deep and suppressed emotion. It is needless to add, that she played the part with a degree of excellence which no other actress 1 POPE, Essay on Man, ii, 218. 2 Fair Penitent, III.

1

3 Ibid., II, i.