Madame la Marquise was held for something divine by Monsieur Jourdain; when the whole creation was supposed to be concentred in the fantastic circle of lords and ladies, and the universal, the abstract, and the critical were held in the utter contempt which they deserve and which they receive at the hands both of the ignorant and the adept! Nothing that we know of is a specific for conjuring up this shadow of the past, and making you (if you are in the mood) feel like a great booby school-boy, with a large bouquet at your breast, or an antiquated fop with a bag-wig and sword-but sitting at the Theatre Français with Mademoiselle Mars and the whole corps dramatique drawn up on the stage. Then you have the very thing before you it glitters in your eyes; it tingles in your ears, it sinks into the heart, and makes warm tears roll down the cheek of those, who have ever felt either what the present or the past is! It is said to be an ill wind that blows nobody good; and probably we owe it to the very exclusion of French players from general society, and their being compelled in self-defence to devote themselves wholly to their profession, that they keep up this sort of traditional copy of the manners, peculiarities, and tone of another age, unmixed with baser matter.' We could wish that a certain happy-spirited writer (who first gave the true pine-apple flavour to theatrical criticism, making it a pleasant mixture of sharp and sweet) would resume the subject of the age of Charles II. (our nearest approach to that of Louis XIV.) and as he has shocked the upstart petulance of Some of his Contemporaries, restore in his inimitable careless manner the wit and graces of a former period.

We expected to have seen Monsieur Perlet on Thursday evening in the Bourgeois Gentilhomme; and to make sure of the ground, had read three acts in the morning with great care and an anticipated relish of the acting. We were therefore disappointed; and the reader must accept of a rhapsody in lieu of a criticism. We think it bad policy to have many new pieces; for the English part of the audience in general require to peruse the text beforehand in order to follow the performance. We like to know exactly what we are about; and it is both a pride and a pleasure to have an excuse for rubbing up our acquaintance with an old and esteemed author. The universality of the French language is not an unalloyed advantage to them it saves the trouble of learning any other, but the necessity of acquiring a new language is like the necessity of acquiring a new sense. It is an increase of knowledge and liberality. We are proud of understanding their authors. Why do they despise ours? Because they are ignorant of them. If they had known what'stuff' we are made of, very likely we should not have beaten them. M. Perlet

played the part of a strolling comedian in the new piece of the Landau, and eats and drinks in an admirable bravura style at a gentleman's house on the road, where he passes himself off as a great man, and with that lively absorption in the present enjoyment and disregard of the consequences of his imposture, which are, we suspect, national traits. In the Landes which followed, he was equally happy in a poor, frightened servant, and expressed the surprises of fear and the tricks and disjointed pantomime antics, to which it resorted to screen itself, with admirable quaintness and drollery. The swagger and self-possession of the one character was totally opposed to the imbecility and helplessness of the other. Madame Falcoz made her first appearance in the Tyran Domestique as Madame Valmont. She is an elegant woman and an interesting actress, though with too much appearance of still-life. This is not the case with Madame Daudel. She has all the vivacity and bustle of a chamber-maid. She ought always to come in with a broom in her hand; or rather, it is quite unnecessary.

The Examiner.]

FRENCH PLAYS-(Continued)

[March 30, 1828. WE exhausted that subject last week, and were complimented upon it, which we took ill. Probably advisable to be ill this week, to let our absence be felt, or to make up with scraps and quotation. To transcribe four different accounts of the Tartuffe, Sir Walter Scott's, Mr. Leigh Hunt's, Monsieur Perlet's, and one of our own, and to make it understood that the last is the best. To remark that Monsieur Perlet, that soul of pleasure and that life of whim,' is a provoking actor-for there is no fault to be found with him, and to give the reader an idea of his peculiar excellence is next to impossible. Whatever he does, his ease, self-possession, and spirit are the same. To make it a rule not to tell any one who asks me the plot of the Ecole des Maris, but to tell it myself. Borrowers of plots are like borrowers of snuff:-every one his own box-keeper. (Ha, ha, ha!) The laugh here comes from a friend of ours to whom we read this, and who kept repeating the whole eveningEvery man his own box-keeper.' (Ha, ha, ha!) Very well indeed. Sganarelle and Ariste are two brothers, both of them in years, who have two wards, Isabelle and Leonore, whom they propose to marry. Sganarelle is an old blockhead, who brings up his intended bride with the greatest severity, and will let her see no plays, go to no balls, receive no visits, lest it should corrupt her manners

or divert her affection from him. He is very angry at his brother Ariste, who gives full liberty to his mistress Leonore, and contends that bars, bolts, female Arguses, and ill-humour are not the way to make women in love with virtue, or to prevent their inclination from wandering. Sganarelle laughs at him, but he turns out a true prophet. Isabelle, not thinking the disagreeable the most agreeable thing in the world, meets with a lover (Valere) more to her mind than her guardian. And here begins the interest of the plot. Having no other mode of communication, she sends Sganarelle to him, to let him know that she is apprized of the state of his affections, and to beg him not to persecute her with his amorous thoughts, if he has any regard for her honour or peace of mind. He understands the hint, and sends the supposed husband away, delighted with his confusion and repulse, who has no sooner returned to his intended, than she desires him to go back with a letter, which Ariste has just had the assurance to send her in his absence, full of his absurd passion. This Sganarelle consents to do, but proposes to open the letter first, which she will not allow him to do, saying it would betray curiosity to break the seal, and no woman of virtue should feel even a wish to know the improper sentiments entertained towards her. Her guardian delivers the letter with an air of triumph and pity for his rival, which Valere reads, and finds it a frank and passionate declaration of Isabelle's attachment to him. Not satisfied with this, she informs Sganarelle that he has a design to carry her off by force, who goes to reproach him with the baseness of his conduct and the pretended terror and uneasiness of his ward. Valere affirming that Sganarelle has no authority to bring him these disdainful messages from the lady, Sganarelle brings them together in his presence, when an admirable scene of double entendre follows: Isabelle declaring that she sees two objects before her, one which she adores, the other which she abhors, Sganarelle taking to himself the preference which is intended for Valere, and the latter rapturously kissing her hand behind his back, while her guardian affectionately embraces her. But in recompense for her fondness, he proposes to marry her the next day instead of at the end of eight days; and this driving Isabelle to despair, she takes the resolution to quit the house in the middle of the night, but is met by her guardian, who asking the meaning of this nocturnal expedition, she tells him that her sister has come to her house, violently in love with Valere, whom she is going in search of, to console her; but Sganarelle not being satisfied with this assignation, will not allow her to remain, and presently after turns his own bride out of doors, thinking it to be his brother's ward Leonore, and goes with great glee to inform Ariste of the adventure, and to lecture him on the difference of their

schemes of female education. In the meantime Leonore comes in from a ball, is scandalized at the story that she hears told of her; and the Notary that Sganarelle had sent for to witness her elopement and the treachery of Valere, having married him to Isabelle, she comes out from his house, and explains the whole mystery to the delight of every one but Sganarelle.-The plot is charming, and the style is profuse of sense and wit; but there is this remark to be made here, as on other of Moliere's plays, that however elegant, ingenious, or natural, the scene must be laid in France, that the whole passes under that empire of words, which is confined to her airy limits, and that there is a credulous and unqualified assent to verbal professions necessary to carry on the plot, which can be found nowhere but in France. This comedy was correctly but somewhat faintly represented. Mademoiselle Falcoz, who played Isabelle, was dressed as we have an idea servants were formerly dressed, with a full handkerchief and a black silk apron. Perhaps it was the costume of young ladies at that period; but we suspect that this is carrying literal correctness too far, where it shocks instead of assisting the imagination, and instructing us at the expense of our amusement, which is against the law of dramatic propriety. If the play was not done quite as it might be, it received a brilliant comment from the looks of some of the audience: and as the stage is a mirror to nature, so these are a mirror to the stage itself. Bright eyes! Laughing lips! Tell-tale eyebrows! spare us or we retire incontinently from the French play, To the woods, to the waves, to the winds we'll complain of your inexorable cruelty and endless persecution!

THE THEATRES AND PASSION-WEEK

The Examiner.

[April 6, 1828.

THIS being Passion-week, there was no play. Because thou art virtuous, shall we not have cakes and ale?" In truth, however, we have no objection to this alternation of festivity and mourning it mimics the order of the natural world. We require a truce with pleasure as well as pain, to enable us to endure the one or to enjoy the other and we must put a stop at some period or other to the whirl of dissipation, unless we would grow quite stupid or giddy. One week out of the fifty-two, in which the theatres shut their doors in your face, in which the play-bills do not flaunt on either side of the way, and you are not followed through the streets while the letter-bell is ringing in your ears, with the importunate repetition of

'A Bill for Covent Garden or Drury Lane,' is not amiss or out of reason; and the cry of Hot-cross buns' fills up the vacancy, and dallies with the interval of suspense not disagreeably. There is a large class of persons who only go to the play during Easter: it is hard if we cannot stay away from it during Passion-week. Our expectations and satisfaction are enhanced by the short restraint put upon them, and outward prevarication with our scruples. Without a little spice of hypocrisy or gravity the world would lose its savour and by the periodical mark of reprobation thus set upon it, the play becomes a sort of pleasant sin all the rest of the year. As for the holiday-folks, Passion-week is to them a kind of bleak desert, beyond which they behold the land of promise,—a ha-ha, or line of circumvallation round the enchanted castle of Pleasure, over which they rush to storm the citadel with double eagerness and obstreperous glee, escaping from the formal gloom of Ash-Wednesday and Good-Friday, into the bright radiance of Easter-Sunday, as from the grave to a bridal, and 'seizing their pleasures

'With rough strife,

Thorough the iron gates of life.'

We do not think the flutter of hope, the sparkle of joy, in the young or old adventurers, on these occasions of mirth and licence, would be complete, were it not for the sense of general restraint and privation which precedes them, and makes the release from the dead pause, the involuntary self-denial of the past week, a more precious achievement to all parties concerned. At least, this inference is pretty plainly discernible in the smiling looks and uneasy delight of the truant visitors in the boxes, and the noise and uproar of the overflowing galleries. To those who object to the disorderly interruptions of the latter, and consider the being present at an Easter-play as vulgar on that account, it may be proper to observe that there is no part of an audience so quiet and attentive as the galleries after the curtain once draws up, if it is not the fault of the actors or the author, who do not make themselves heard or understood so far; and again, we conceive it might be of service to dramatic writers sometimes to hazard their persons or compromise their dignity in the gallery, to see what impression their scenes make on hearts fresh from nature's mint, instead of stationing themselves in the dress-boxes, to overhear polite whispers, or moulding their features in the glass of newspaper criticism the next day. The tears shed in silence by these untutored spectators, the breath held in, the convulsive sob, the eager gaze, the glance of delight, would afford better hints and lessons how to revive the spirit and the pathos of the primitive stage, than any instructions