brothel; which poor Kemble, in his zeal for purity, used always to call bordello. Ellen makes her escape, and passes the night under a shed. She at length determines to go back to our Diamond, and implore her to conceal from her friends the rash step she had taken-but these moral people do nothing by halves-she has already told them the story. Despair now sends Miss Metland into the Thames; but the Humane Society are on the alert-their agent, the wise man of the east, recovers the virtuous unfortunate, and is rewarded by finding his own son to have been the seducer. So promising a debut in the young man, secures for him an irresistible sympathy; and he is thought to be "the most desertless and fit man," as a husband, for the young lady. And with a general AVE! THOANOA! the piece concludes. But the critic has a still better and the only proper conclusion, which Duke Theseus in the Midsummer Night's Dream, has fortunately supplied. "Marry, if he that writ it, had played Clarenceforth, and hung himself in Ellen's garter, it would have been a fine tragedy, and so it is truly, and very notably discharged." LEWIS was not a man, in point of moral decorum, to be insulted thus by either Kotzebue or Mistress Inchbald; so in his East Indian, which I read for Mrs. Jordan, he started a married man of the most exalted sentiments, who enjoying the hospitality, the confidence, the friendship of a Mr. Mortimer, debauches his daughter. She is, in course, a young lady, comme il y en a peu; of the purest principles, and doting upon her father. But this husband, Mr. Dorimont, has those gentle arts of persuasion, which induce her to leave her parent to unappeaseable agony, and accept the situation always vacant, in spite of a wife—I mean that of his chere amie. The interview in the fifth act, between the father and his daughter, is one of the most moving things upon the stage; indeed it seems to have removed, very opportunely, the wife of the said Dorimont; and as the principle of the young lady had been happily established already, she dressed herself at once in the robes that so exactly fitted her, and became an honest woman to her heart's content, and that of the fond, abused, and forgiving Mr. Mortimer. Our friend, Duke Theseus, not having been aware of this additional outrage to his patience, has left no particular instruction for our guidance; but as the disorder seems to be only a variety of the former, the direction as to the treatment cannot in reason be altered for the better. Miss Biggs now acted Zorayda, instead of Mrs. Jordan, who, as the youthful heroine commonly of these moral times, was hardly ever free from such delicate embarrassments. She confessed freely, that "she had a hankering after tender parts; and used to mention her performance of Viola, in Twelfth Night, as a proof that, had her natural pathos, when young, been refined by an intercourse with the more polished part of society, she might have risen even to eminence in tragedy." I am so afraid of the artificial, that I can only rejoice, that she lost the opportunity of being second to any body; and that both nature and accident confined her to the characters in which she was certainly first, by the free display of her own inimitable humour, and unaffected sensibility. The theatre now for some time was without Mrs. Jordan's assistance, in consequence of her confine ment at Bushy, and the birth of a son on the 9th of December. Managers have often lamented those temporary confinements of great actresses, and indeed they disconcert the best-conceived arrangements of a season. To do the plays themselves, with substitutes, is to render them unattractive-to change the plays is perhaps possible, but usually inefficient. There were, fortunately for Kemble, many of Shakspeare's plays, which depended entirely upon himself; a sort of monodrama, or the display of single greatness; and some of his best plays, in fact, are of this description. The following suffer but little, if the accompanying performers are respectable, provided you have a first-rate actor to sustain what may be called the heroes of them. Hamlet, Richard III., Merchant of Venice, Henry V., Lear, and Othello. These were always resources to Kemble, which he could act himself. His friend, the antiquary, greatly admired that great actor's Richard, probably because, to suit a favourite hypothesis of the critics, Richard was thus again one of the "handsomest men of his time." Kemble invited antiquarian remarks, for he loved accuracy, and used to say to me, Well, Mr. Boaden, and the gentleman is right; and when I am really manager of a theatre, the absurdities which he remarks upon shall be corrected." The first blow of the critic fell on Messrs. France and Banting, the royal undertakers of Henry the Sixth, whom they "shut close from every vulgar eye,' though, in Richard's time, they bore the deceased Lady Anne accordingly bends over him, and thus invocates his ghost "Loe, in these windowes, that let forth thy life, I powre the helplesse balme of my poore eyes." Shakspeare's own stage direction would have kept them right Enter the coarse of Henrie the Sixt, with Halberds to Not in mourning, with the modern crapes, and the everlasting white pocket-handkerchief. Her quick exclamations to the bearers, upon observing |