the images, the very words are hers. His plays can only be compared with nature-they are unlike every thing else.

Antony and Cleopatra, though not in the first order of Shakespeare's productions, is one of the best of his historical plays. It is every where full of that pervading comprehensive power, by which the poet seemed to identify himself with time and nature. The pomp and voluptuous charms of Cleopatra are displayed in all their force and lustre, as well as the effeminate grandeur of the soul of Mark Antony. The repentance of Enobarbus after his treachery to his master, the most beautiful and affecting part of the play, is here, for some reason, entirely omitted. Nothing can have more local truth and perfect character than the passage in which Cleopatra is represented as conjecturing what were the employments of Antony in his absence. "He's speaking now, or murmuring-'Where's my serpent of old Nile?'" Or again, when she says to Antony, after the defeat of Actium, and his resolution to risk another fight-"It is my birth-day; I had thought to have held it poor, but since my Lord is Antony again, I will be Cleopatra." The transition, in the present compilation, from these flashes of genius which lay open the inmost soul, to the forced mechanical style and architectural dialogue of Dryden, is abrupt and painful.

3

The play was got up with every advantage of external pomp and decoration. Mr. Young, as Mark Antony, exhibited a just and impressive picture of the Roman hero, struggling between the dictates of his love and honour. Mrs. M'Gibbon was a respectable and interesting representative of Octavia. Mrs. Faucit's Cleopatra conveyed at least a reflex image of the voluptuous magnificence of the Queen of Egypt. In the ironical scenes with Antony, her

1 Ant. and Cle., I, v, 24-5.

2 Ibid., III, xiii, 185-7.

3 Charles Mayne Young (1777-1856) made his début at the Haymarket as Hamlet, June 22, 1807, and made his farewell in the same character, May 31, 1832.

manner sometimes bordered too much on the affected levity of a modern fine lady, and wanted the passion and dignity of the enamoured and haughty sovereign. In the part of Ventidius, we are sorry to say, that we think Mr. Terry was by no means successful. His manner had all the turbulent ferocity of a gloomy savage, none of the lofty firmness of the Roman Senator. The expression of the passion was every where too coarse and too physical; his muscles assumed a preternatural rigidity, and the mode in which he articulated every sentence was distinct, almost to dislocation. The house, however, seemed to be of a different opinion; for, in the several scenes with Mr. Young, he was loudly and tumultuously applauded.

[The play was given out for a second representation on Wednesday.]

ARTAXERXES.

[Covent Garden] October 18, 1813.

2

MISS STEPHENS1 made her appearance again on Saturday 2 at Covent-Garden, as Mandane, in Artaxerxes. She becomes more and more a favourite with the public. Her singing is delicious; but admired as it is, it is not yet admired as it ought to be. Oh, if she had been wafted to us from Italy!-A voice more sweet, varied, and flexible, was perhaps never heard on an English stage. In "The Soldier tired," her voice, though it might be said to cleave the very air, never once lost its sweetness and clearness. "Let not rage thy bosom firing was deservedly and

1 Miss Catherine Stephens (1794-1882), who made her début as Mandane on Sept. 23, was modestly announced as “a Young Lady, her first appearance on any stage." She married the 5th Earl of Essex in 1838.

2 October 16.

4 Ibid., III, iii.

3 Artaxerxes, III, iv.

rapturously encored. But if we were to express a preference, it would be to her singing the lines, "What was my pride is now my shame,' etc. in which the notes seemed to fall from her lips like the liquid drops from the bending flower, and her voice fluttered and died away with the expiring conflict of passion in her bosom." We know, and have felt the divine power and impassioned tones of Catalani 3—the lightning of her voice and of her eye-but we doubt whether she would give the ballad style of the songs in Artaxerxes, simple but elegant, chaste but full of expression, with equal purity, taste, and tenderness.

Mr. Liston's acting in Love, Law, and Physic," was as excellent as it always is. It is hard to say, whether the soul of Mr. Liston has passed into Mr. Lubin Log, or that of Mr. Lubin Log into Mr. Liston:-but a most wonderful congeniality and mutual good understanding there is between them. A more perfect personation we never witnessed. The happy compound of meanness, ignorance, vulgarity, and conceit, was given with the broadest effect, and with the nicest discrimination of feeling. Molière would not have wished for a richer representative of his Bourgeois Gentilhomme. We insist the more on this point, because of all imitations we like the imitation of nature best. The marked cockneyism of pronouncing the V for the W, was the only circumstance to which we could object, and this is an interpolation on the part since we first saw it, suggested (we suppose) by friends. It is a hackneyed and cheap way of producing a laugh, unworthy of the true comic genius of Liston.

1 In the air" If o'er the cruel tyrant." Ibid., II, ii.

2 This performance is again referred to; see pp. 111-12, post.

3 Angelica Catalani, who frequently sang in London between 1806 and 1824, died June 12, 1849.

4 John Liston (1776?-1846) first appeared at the Haymarket in 1805. He married Miss Tyrer in 1807, and she continued to act until 1822.

5 Love, Law, and Physic, by James Kenney, was produced at Covent Garden November 20, 1812. It was given on October 16 after Ar

taxerxes.

THE BEGGAR'S OPERA.1

[Covent Garden] October 23, 1813.

The Beggar's OPERA was acted at Covent-Garden last night," for the purpose of introducing Miss Stephens in the character of Polly. The play itself is among the most popular of our dramas, and one which the public are always glad to have some new excuse for seeing acted again. Its merits are peculiarly its own. It not only delights, but instructs us, without our knowing how, and though it is at first view equally offensive to good taste and common decency. The materials, indeed, of which it is composed, the scenes, characters, and incidents, are in general of the lowest and most disgusting kind; but the author, by the sentiments and reflections which he has put into the mouths of highwaymen, turnkeys, their wives and daughters, has converted the motley group into a set of fine gentlemen and ladies, satirists, and philosophers. What is still more extraordinary, he has effected this transformation without once violating probability, or "o'erstepping the modesty of nature." In fact, Gay has in this instance turned the tables on the critics; and by the assumed licence of the mock-heroic style, has enabled him-\ self to do justice to nature, that is, to give all the force, truth, and locality of real feeling to the thoughts and expressions, without being called to the bar of false taste, and affected delicacy. We might particularly refer to Polly's description of the death of her lover, and to the song, "Woman is like

1 Hazlitt says of this article: "It was almost the last I ever wrote with any pleasure to myself" (Table Talk, p. 413). He has repeated the greater part of the article in The Round Table, No. 17, pp. 91-3, and the whole of the second paragraph in Lectures on the English Poets, pp. 143-4.

2

Friday, October 22.

3

Hamlet, III, ii, 21.

the fair flower in its lustre,"1 the extreme beauty and feeling of which are only equalled by their characteristic propriety and naïveté. Every line of this sterling comedy sparkles with wit, and is fraught with the keenest and bitterest invective.

It has been said by a great moralist, "There is some soul of goodness in things evil;"2 and The Beggar's Opera is a good-natured, but severe comment on this text. The poet has thrown all the gaiety and sunshine of the imagination, the intoxication of pleasure, and the vanity of despair, round the short-lived existence of his heroes, while Peachum and Lockitt are seen in the back-ground, parcelling out their months and weeks between them. The general view of human life is of the most refined and abstracted kind. With the happiest art, the author has brought out the good qualities and interesting emotions almost inseparable from humanity in the lowest situations, and with the same penetrating glance, has detected the disguises which rank and circumstance lend to exalted vice. It may be said that the moral of the piece (which some respectable critics have been at a loss to discover), is to show the vulgarity of vice; and that the sophisms with which the great and powerful palliate their violations of integrity and decorum, are, in fact, common to them with the vilest, most abandoned and contemptible of the species. What can be more galling than the arguments used by these would-be politicians, to prove that in hypocrisy, selfishness, and treachery, they are far behind some of their betters? The exclamation of Mrs. Peachum, when her daughter marries Macheath, "Hussy, hussy, you will be as ill used and as much neglected as if you had married a Lord,' ,"3 is worth all Miss Hannah More's laboured invectives on the laxity of the manners of high life!

1

"Virgins are like," etc., Beggar's Opera, I, i.

2 Henry V, IV, i, 4.

3

Beggar's Opera, I, i.

4 Hannah More (1745-1833), author of An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World, 1790, etc., etc., and of the tragedy, Percy (see p. 125, post).