who returns to her more loving than ever, and wants nothing more than your consent to celebrate the nuptials. Jaquemin. As for you, Sir, I believe you are an honourable man; but it is Mr. Sainville who introduced you to me, and he has behaved in such a manner that his aquaintance with you is no recommendation to me But no; it is Louise alone who is the cause of all this. Louise. Permit me to withdraw, I cannot bear your anger; but since it has been kindled by Mr. Sainville, I hate his very name. [Exit. Jaquemin. Very well, she hates him; and he is gone never to return! Therese. But father, my cousin and I are not in the least guilty. Jaquemin. Hold your tongue; this is the effect of my goodness, my indulgence, or rather my folly; but I'll be so no more; and if you don't amend I'll give you all up, and you shall die old maids! [Exit. Therese. Oh father! do not curse us. Agathe. What a passion! Pauline. What a burst of rage! Corsignac (to Pauline). Be so kind as to initiate me into this mystery. Pauline. What do you wish, Sir? to fatigue me with your love; it would be very untimely, for I never was so far from feeling disposed to laugh in my life. [Exit. Ledoux (to Agathe). Must I a second time withdraw from your presence? Agathe. Just as you please. My guardian is angry with me without knowing why, and so am 1 with you. [Exit. Corsignac. Every head goes wrong in this house. circumstances, partly by his father's profusion, and partly by his own credulity in depending upon a false friend. He is attached to Sylvia Convoy, who is under the guardianship of two uncles, who are both solicitous that she should inarry. She has two other lovers, one Grumley, the tyrannical Lord of the Manor, and Verdict, the Attorney of the village. She despises them both, and is secretly partial to Frank WoodlandFrank, having but little fortune, is too delicate to avail himself of her affection. After several ludicrous mistakes, and much pleasant equivoque, the uncles consent to a marriage, and it appears that one of these uncles, Commodore Convoy, had brought home property belonging to Frank, which enables him to redeem his estate from mortgage in the hands of Grumley. There is an under-plot arising from a former connection between the Lawyer and the Widow Hall, as well as from the distresses of an old schoolmaster and his family who have been brought to beggary by the oppression of Grumley. The piece is diversified by the humours of the Commodore, of the Lawyer, of a rustic Wailer, as well as by the wild desperation of Invoice, a broken speculator. This Comedy is the production of Mr. T. Dibdin, who approaches nearer to the particular line of Mr. Colman than any modern dramatist. If we were inclined to be fastidious we might object to the model he has chosen; but as the drama, by the general concurrence of the town, has long been exempted from the obligation of ordinary rules, and been suffered to plead to criticism with a pardon in its pocket, it would be ungenerous to quarrel with the puns or attempts at overcharged character, which abound in this Therese (to Ledoux). Follow Agathe.-(To|| piece. Consignac.) and you Pauline. Corsignac. Let us interrogate your father, the servants, the whole house, for we must know whence this tempest proceeds. Therese. From our neighbour, Ursule, I have no doubt. [Exit. Corsignac. Yes, you are right, I'll soon find it [Exit. out. Ledoux. Why did I return so soon. END OF THE SECOND ACT. (To be continued.) HAYMARKET. THE public were on Thursday, the 13th, attracted to this theatre by a new Comedy, entitled Errors Excepted. The scene lies in a country town, and though there is no great intricacy in the plot, it is very well calculated to excite an interest, and to afford diversion. The hero of the piece, Frank Woodland, is embarrassed in his In a country where folly is faith, who would be a martyr to good sense? In an age in which the stage relishes, and indeed admits nothing else, Mr. Dibdin would be to blame to risk his profit for his reputation, or prefer the general object of writing to one of its most barren and precarious compensations. This is doubtless Mr. Dibdin's excuse to himself, and may well be admitted as his apology to the critics. Some objections, however, we are bound to make. In the first place, the plot was somewhat stale -A bankrupt not appearing to his commission, a young man becoming a dupe to misplaced confidence, a ship foundering at sea, &c. &c. Incidents of this sort are of a species of plot which abound in that catalogue of mercantile sufferings, Lloyd's List and the London Gazette. Mr. Dibdin might have looked around him, and found a better story with ease. The characters were not very new; Verdict is an exception. The idea of the buckish country pettifogger was original; we trust Mr. Dibdin will not abandon this character. In the present piece it is a mere sketch. The country waiter was very good, and the landlady not amiss. The chief merit of this piece, however, was the dialogue, with a few exceptions as to the puns The first scene in the second act, in which Sylvia ridicules some modern fashions, particularly that of Egyptian furniture, was written with a true spirit of wit and vivacity, which would have done honour to any writer of the age. tone of irony, leaving the joke and the laugh to the audience, he very kindly conducted them to it by his own grimace, and spluttered and gabbled through his part, as if it had been Ollapod or Caleb Quotem. The humour of Puff is too refined for the comic habits of Fawcett. Mathews's Sir Fretful Plagiary was admirable; it was most successfully drest; his affected can dour had a very fine tone of hypocrisy; his petulance and impatience were given with the most inimitable exterior gesture; in a word, Mathews, in this character, was not inferior to Parsons himself. Dangle and Sncer were both mediocre. Mrs. Liston, in Tilburina, was excellent, and Waddy was a good representative of the mute Lord Burleigh. The piece was well received, and continues to attract. The piece was well supported by the performers, and warmly received by the audience Among the performers we have chiefly to notice Mrs. Litchfield, who may be said to have done more than justice for the author. Mathews was excellent; and dressed his character most admirably. Mr. Young appeared to no advantage; the part was unsuited to him, and had little effect. An airy, spirited Epilogue was delivered by Mrs. STRUCTURE OF OUR THEATRES. Litchfield, in a manner which procured her general applause. Mr. Sheridan's dramatic satire, The Critic, has been revived at this theatre. It has been a good deal anticipated in its effect by Tom Thumb, a piece which, without the ostentation of criticism, or any grave attempt to expose the faults of dramatic composition by means of ridicule, is invariably diverting by the vivacity of its burlesque and the pleasant originality of its caricature. The Rehearsal was of that class of plays which Aristotle might have written,-criticism thrown into a dramatic form, and familiarised and invigorated by stage examples; Tom Thumb might have been the combination of Aristophanes and Plautus; but the Critic has all the grace and elegance of Horace, with the addition of that humour so peculiar to English writers. MR. EDITOR, ON THE THE strictures in my first letter were confined to the shape of the house, or part allotted to the spectators; the remarks in my second epistle had for their object the disposition of the proscenium, or intermediate space between the house and the stage; the observations of this my third serawl will entirely relate to the arrangement of the stage itself. With regard to this latter part of our theatrical structurs, allow me to begin by observing that our nation, which perhaps makes a more dex. terous and more extensive use of machinery than any other, in the production and improvement of objects of direct utility and comfort, seems to avail itself less than any other, of the powers of mechanism, in the promotion and the perfecting of instruments and means of mere diversion and show. In the great Italian and French theatres, every change of scenery, however extensive its whole, and however complicated its parts, is entirely ac Notwithstanding the value of this piece, it is better in the closet than on the stage. The majority of an audience understand nothing of criticism. They judge of good or bad writings only by effect; they laugh at a thing decidedly ridi-complished by means of machinery. The turnculous, without any help from critical sagacity, or application of the joke beyond its present object. When Burleigh shakes his head and makes his exit, the laugh is at the actor's grimace; the satire on the stiff and empty courtier of modern tragedy is perceived, and relished but by few. For stage effect, therefore, Tom Thumb is much superior to the Critic-Its satire is of a very different value and kind. The Haymarket company is not quite strong enough to do justice to this piece. Fawcett was the Puff; but he was not solemn nor dry enough for the impostor. Instead of delivering the dialogue in a grave and serious ing of one single wheel effects at once, both the simultaneous retreat of the entire assemblage of wings and drops and flat, that are to disappear, and the simultaneous advancement of the entire set of lateral and top and back scenes, that are to come forward in their place: so that the deepest forest or gard n scene is, as if by magic, in a twinkling, converted into a street or palace. In the English playhouses, on the contrary, every change of scenery (if we except a few of those very confined and partial transfigurations of our Harlequinades, termed Pantomimes) is at chieved by dint of hands; and, whether the action lie in Peru or in China, in ancient Greece or modern London, whenever the scene is to be shifted, out pop a parcel of fellows in ragged laced liveries, to announce the event, and to bring it about by mere manual labour, They are not only distinctly heard, giving each other directions to that purpose, to the unspeakable annoyance of the actor, whom they perhaps outbellow in some of his finest passages-but they are even distinctly seen, tugging and pulling piecemeal at each different piece of the scenery : of these various divisions some hitch, others tumble; here a wing comes rolling on the stage before its time, there another lags behind until perhaps the time for a new removal is arrived: || and thus does every one of those changes of decoration, so frequent in English plays, only present a scene of confusion, most distressing to the eye. be supposed to lead to different distinct contiguous apartments, it has as many more additional doors as there are supposed to be such apartments, each contrived in some one of the wings that line the sides of the stage. This practice not only increases the illusion of the scene, but, what is still more material, renders much easier the understanding of the plot: not to speak of the infinitely more striking effect which is produced by a performer of a commanding mien, and invested with a dignified character, entering the scene at the centre, and from his very first appearance presenting himself in front to the spectators, than when obliged to slide edgeways on and off the boards, through an interstice in the side scenes. In England there hardly ever is a central door, contrived in the flat which closes the scene: Whatever be the performance, and whoever be the personages, they all either walk in and out at the permanent doors, which form part of the proscenium; and, which, as I have already observed, offer in their architecture and decoration no harmony or connection whatever with the peculiar scenery or event exhibited; or they slide in and out, between the intervals of the wings, which are generally intended to represent a solid cohering wall; so that, were the laws of perspective sufficiently attended to, in the painting of the scenes, to render the separation between their different divisions as imperceptible as it ought to be, and to make them look like an uninterrupted mass of masonry, the entrée and the exit of each personage athwart this solid wall, would every time appear effected by downright witchcraft. I shall not expatiate at length, on the constant violation of those laws of perspective, which ought to make the whole range of wings and drops and flat, one single cohering body; or on the equally constant disregard of those rules of congruity, which should render every one of these different component parts of the same whole, subservient to an uniform style of architecture and of decoration. Suffice it to say, that this violation and this disregard of the most essential conditions of theatrical illusion are carried in England to the highest pitch. Instead of fitting to each other's extremities with nicety, the wings and drops often encroach upon each other's boundaries in such a way as to occasion, in the different objects which they represent, the most unsightly maimings and breaks: and not unfrequently is the roof of the humblest hovel lost in the tattered sky. For the most part, the wings, neither in the style, nor in the proportions, nor in the perspective of their architec-performers to help themselves to, when required: ture, correspond at all with the flat with which they are associated; and between the extreme shallowness of these wings, and the excessive width of the intervening spaces between them, half the audience is treated, in all our playhouses, with a full view, not only of the premeditated and full dress play, acted before the scenes, but of the extempore and undress play, going forward behind the stage, to the utter destruction of all illusion, decorum, and pleasure! On the French stage, whenever the scene represents a room, particular attention is given to the making that room appear habitable and inhabited. It always displays in the very centre of the flat or closing part, its own appropriate folding door, at which the dramatis personæ usually go in and out; and if, from the peculiar texture of the play exhibited, this room should In French scenery, a room, represented as inhabited, always is made to display a few chairs, and other pieces of appropriate furniture, disposed all around, and ready for the nor, if, in the play that is acting, a dialogue be tween two seated personages, should not be intended to take place, until, perhaps, near the very conclusion of the scene, would a couple of the gentlemen in laced liveries aforementioned, as if endowed with the gift of second sight from the very rising of the curtain, lug two lumbering arm chairs to the very centre of the in all other respects totally unfurnished boards; there to remain, staring the spectators full in the face, during the whole of the ensuing scene, in order to give them timely intimation of a conversation, which, perhaps, the author has been torturing his wits to represent as an unpremeditated and spontaneous effusion, resulting from the most unforeseen concurrence of incidents. A. Z. directions annoyancebellow in are even piecemeal of these tumble; h - before its ti perhaps th and thus d coration, so the eye. I shall no violation of ought to m drops and fi the equally congruity, these differe whole, subs tecture and this violatio essential com ried in Engl fitting to ea the wings an other's houn in the differe most unsigh unfrequently lost in the ta wings, neithe the making th bited. It alw the flat or cl folding door, usually go in a texture of the |