on a subject on which we do not feel altogether at home, we should say that M. Perlet's Miser was in its ordinary aspect rather the serving-man in a half-famished house, than a personification of the demon of selfishness, fretfulness, and avarice. It was hard and indifferent-not gloating enough, not morbid enough, not restless and harassed enough. Farther, we suspect there is this fault in his general acting and in French comedy: we grant it is not gross; is it not, on the other hand, too slight and evanescent? They charge us with over-doing; are they not then liable to under-do, and fall short of the mark? If there is such a thing as caricature, there is also an antithesis to it, and not only a danger of loading a character to excess, but of giving a profile or section of it for the whole, and not taking all the licence that truth and nature gives. We are dreadfully afraid of being misled by national prejudices; but (that being premised) we cannot but add our conviction that M. Perlet's acting, with all its purity, propriety, and spirit, wants something of richness and breadth.-The little piece which followed the Avare, Ninette à la cour, was delightful both in itself and as giving Mademoiselle Fanny Vertpres an opportunity to display her mignon figure and provoking ways. There seem to be two styles of female coquetry in France, extreme flutter and vivacity, or perfect calmness and self-possession. The one is set in motion by everything; the other is put out of its way by nothing. Miss Fanny Vertpres is of the latter class. With great presence of mind and ready wit, she joins to the symmetry the apparent coolness and indifference of a marble statue. She takes everything in good part, and slides into a number of ticklish adventures and situations with all the ease imaginable. She is only troubled at being laughed at-a misfortune against which no French patience is proof. The scenes behind the looking-glass and behind her fan with her rustic lover (Laporte), whom she beguiles in an enchanting feigned voice (prettier even than her own) are quite delightful, and dispose one to believe that comedy has not yet exhausted all its precious stores. Mademoiselle St. Ange played the Countess with all her country's ease and grace. Monsieur Laporte strikes us as a confirmation of the remarks we have made above on French comedy, by the very circumstance of his being an exception to them. There is nothing automatic in his manner. He not only utters a jest, but he enjoys it too-not that he forces it upon us either, except by the gentle violence of sympathy. There is (so to speak) an atmosphere of humour about him, which reflects the immediate object with kindly warmth and lustre. His acting both in Maître Jacques and in the after-piece evinced that easy play of feeling, that transition from grave to gay, that mixture of wit and folly, those natural varieties of laughter and tears, which mark the master in his art and the genuine son of Momus. We dropped in at Covent Garden to see Mr. Warde in the Seraglio and Charles Kemble in Charles the Second, who seems really born for the character, and whose fine person and accomplishments are thrown away in these degenerate days. Mr. Power makes a very passable Irish Rochester: but the wit and the rake had defects enough of his own to answer for, without having the brogue added to them. The same fault may be found with Mr. Warde, who would make a very respectable actor in the middle walk of tragedy, could he but controul his voice within the compass of the four seas. MRS. SIDDONS The Examiner] [May 25, 1828. THERE has been no novelty this week at any of our theatres, English or French, except that little Mademoiselle Jenny Vertpre has been metamorphosed into a cat, and has been playing in the Pie Voleuse at the Lyceum. She played the first charmingly; the last prettily, though we have seen it done better. There is a calibre, a weight of metal in Miss Kelly's pathos, which the French actress is without. Our lively neighbours are doubtless born to converse, to live, and act with ease—all is set in motion like a feather, stopped like a feather. Smiles play upon the lips, tears start into their eyes and are dried up for nothing; an exclamation and a sigh settle the account between life and death; all is a game at make-believe, thoughtless and innocent as childhood, in the baby-house of their imagination-but if you wish to see the heart-strings crack, go and see Miss Kelly in the Maid of Palisseau; or if you would see the stately pillar of Tragedy itself fall and crush the subjected world, then you should have witnessed Mrs. Siddons formerly in some of her overwhelming parts. That was a flood of tears indeed a drinking of the brimming cup of human joys and woes to the very last drop, the recollection of which may serve one all the rest of one's life. We understand that not long ago Sir Walter Scott and Mrs. Siddons met in the same room before Mr. Martin's picture of the Fall of Nineveh-two such spectators the world cannot match again, the one by the common consent of mankind the foremost writer of his age, the other in the eyes of all who saw her prime or her maturity, the queen and mistress of the tragic scene. Forgive us, gentle, ever-living shade of Jenny Deans, agonised soul of Balfour of Burley, heroic spirit of Rebecca of York, immortal memory of Dumbie Dikes and of a thousand more, if we should have turned from you and from him who invented you, to bow the knee and kiss the hem of the garment of her who represented to our youthful gaze the Mourning Bride, Hermione, Belvidera, Beverley's wife, and was the Muse of Tragedy personified. We are sorry that Mrs. Siddons has abridged Paradise Lost, and that Sir Walter has written a triumphant peroration over the worst, the second fall of man.' We are perhaps runagates and Goths; but the smell of the links that used to ply between Covent garden and Drury lane prevails in our imagination over all the heather-bloom of Scotland, and we declare that Mrs. Siddons appears to us the more masculine spirit of the two. Sir Walter (when all's said and done) is an inspired butler, a 'Yes and No, my Lord' fellow in a noble family —Mrs. Siddons is like a cast from the antique, or rather like the original, divine or more than human, from which it was taken. Yet close to each other, within narrow space, were placed two heads, on which glory sat plumed, beat two hearts over which had rolled the volume of earth's bliss or woe, were interchanged glances that had reflected the brightness of the universe. Who would not rather see Sir Walter Scott's fringed eyelids and storied forehead than the vacant brow of prince or peer? When Mrs. Siddons used to sit in parties and at drawing-rooms, the Lady Marys and the Lady Dorothys of the day came and peeped into the room to get a glance of her, with more awe and wonder than if it had been a queen. This was honour, this was power. There was but one person in the world who would have drawn the gaping gaze of curiosity from these and from all the crowned heads in Europe; and Sir Walter exults that he perished like a felon in the grasp of a jailor. We must indeed admire the talents, when we forgive the use of them : or is it that genius, with its lofty crest and variegated colours, seems destined like the serpent to lick the dust, and crawl all its life with its belly on the ground? We can reckon up in our time three great tragic performers; Mrs. Siddons, Mr. Kean, and Madame Pasta. (If there is a fourth instance, we either know not of it, or it is Miss Kelly but that in a parenthesis, as our private opinion, or that of persons no wiser than ourselves.) Of these three, Mrs. Siddons seemed to command every source of terror and pity, and to rule over their wildest elements with inborn ease and dignity. Her person was made to contain her spirit; her soul to fill and animate her person. Her eye answered to her voice. She wore a crown. She looked as if descended from a higher sphere, and walked the earth in majesty and pride. She sounded the full diapason, touched all chords of passion, they thrilled through her, and yet she preserved an elevation of thought and character above them, like the tall cliff round which the tempest roars, but its head reposes in the blue serene! Mrs. Siddons combined the utmost grandeur and force with every variety of expression and excellence: her transitions were rapid and extreme, but were massed into unity and breadth-there was nothing warped or starting from its place-she produced the most overpowering effects1 without the slightest effort, by a look, a word, a gesture. Mr. Kean, in the intellectual and impassioned part, is in our judgment equal to any one, but he produces his most striking effects by fits and starts, without the same general tone and elevation of character, and, for want of the instrumental advantages, with an appearance of effort and sometimes of extravagance. Madame Pasta, on the contrary, never goes out of her way, never aims at effect or startles by any one pointed passage, nor does she combine a variety of feelings together (as far as we have seen) but she rises to the very summit of her art, and satisfies every expectation by absolute and unbroken integrity of purpose, and by the increasing and unconscious intensity of passion. She has neither Mr. Kean's inequalities nor Mrs. Siddons's scope: she neither deviates from the passion nor rises above it, but she commits herself wholly to its impulse, borrows strength from its strength, ascends with it to heaven, or is buried in the abyss. In a word, she is the creature of truth and nature, and joins the utmost simplicity with the utmost force. This has little to do with Mademoiselle Jenny Vertpre: ah! she is charming too, and we hope to have a great deal to say in her praise-twenty years hence. She counts her silver spoons inimitably, and when she is suspected of stealing one of them says, 'C'est desagreable,' in a voice and manner that none but a Frenchwoman can. The Misanthrope and the Bourgeois Gentilhomme have been repeated at this theatre; and M. Perlet has done equal justice to Moliere's sententious gravity in the one, and to his delightful flighty farce and fanciful exaggeration of folly in the other. Moliere is our Wycherley and O'Keefe, both in one: or it might be said that he possessed the critical sense of Montaigne, with the exuberant mirth and humour of Rabelais. We believe this little theatre, with its lively company and excellent pieces, answers tolerably well, as most French theatres do. We were thinking of this the other evening, and thought we had accounted for it. The French performances, with a tenth of the 1 Lady Byron, when a girl, was so affected at seeing Mrs. Siddons as Isabella, in the Fatal Marriage, that she was carried out fainting into the lobbies, and kept sobbing and exclaiming involuntarily 'Oh, Byron, Byron !' Egad, she had enough of Byron afterwards. This good-natured remark is not ours. Whose, reader, do you suppose it is? We have heard the late Mr. Curran say, that when he was a young man studying the law at the Temple, his supreme delight was to see Mrs. Siddons in her great parts, and all he wanted was a couple of pails on each side of him to fill them with his tears! Such things have been. audience, pay better than the English with ten times the number and receipts. How so? It arises, on a critical inquiry, from the unity of place, which is the fundamental law of the French drama. One barbarism leads to another;-a slight technical distinction involves manager after manager in bankruptcy and ruin. Where there is no change of situation, the scenery is the same; and where this is the case, it is no object either of attraction or expense. Little more is required than a drop-scene. Therefore, all you have to do is to get good plays, and a good company to perform them: three or four hundred people in the house will maintain a dozen or a score of comedians on the stage; and the excellence of the performance and the taste of the town keep pace with one another, and with the absence of show and extrinsic decoration. But with us all this is reversed. The scene travels, and our scene-shifters, scene-painters, mechanists, and the whole theatrical commissariat go along with it. The variety, the gaudiness, the expense is endless: to pay for the getting up such an immense apparatus, the houses must be enlarged to hold a proportionable rabble of barren spectators:' the farther off they are thrown, the stronger must be the glare, the more astonishing the effect, and the play and the players (with all relish for wit or nature) dwindle into insignificance, and are lost in the blaze of a huge chandelier or the grin of a baboon. We do not see the features of the actors, but we admire (very justly) Mr. Stanfield's landscape back-grounds, or a castle set on fire by Mr. Farley; we hear the din and bray of the orchestra, not the honeyed words of the poet; and still we wonder that operas and melo-drames flourish, and that the legitimate stage and good old English Comedy languishes. Poor old green curtain! when thou wast withdrawn to make room for gas-lights and shining marble pillars, the last relic of the heart-felt pageant faded; and the Veluti in speculum flew after Astraa to the skies! The Examiner] THE THREE QUARTERS, &c. [June 1, 1828. DRURY LANE. THE new comedy in three acts brought out at this theatre on Tuesday evening is, we apprehend, taken from a French piece, entitled Les Trois Quartiers. The Three Quarters of the town indicate the three sorts or stages of society, as they are to be met with in the Rue St. Honoré, the Rue Mont Blanc, and the Fauxbourg St. Germain, which may be supposed to answer (we speak under correction of the Secretary of the Admiralty, skilled as he is in the transitions from low to high |