444 Notes of the Month. 



beyond our expectations. [And beyond ours also.] Mr. Corrie made a good 

 ' Owen.* And what does he play ill ? [Aye, what does Mr. Corrie play ill? - 

 or well either, we may ask for information's sake.] And Mr. Lacey was a 

 surprising ' Dougal ' [quite surprising we'll lay any odds.] But with these 

 exceptions, and the singing of Mr. Yarnold and Miss Atkinson, how dull and 

 flat was the performance !" 



Now if it had not been for those confounded halos and clouds a ' Rob Roy' 

 might be endured in which there were " powerful," " effective," " energetic 

 and able," " good," and " surprising " acting, and singing not to be sneezed 

 at, to say the least of it. But what is a Rob Roy at the Theatre Royal New- 

 castle with a halo of melancholy or a deep dark cloud of despondency over it? 

 Aye, it may be, gracious powers ! over the whole house. What signify " these 

 exceptions" of surprising acting and uncensured singing? And listen to 

 what's coming : " Mr. Ray's 'Bailey Nicol Jarvie' mighthave been respectable 

 if it had not been for the awful Scotch, and Mr. Silver looked ' Major Gal- 

 braith' infinitely better than he played it." The least we can say of Mr. Silver 

 is that he must have had a great deal of brass to attempt to look the Major 

 better than he played it. Had he looked it merely as well, we might have 

 passed over his delinquency with silent contempt : but better such assurance 

 is intolerable. 



But oh, for a seventy-seven donkey or a fifty-four elephant power of words 

 to express our indignant abhorrence of Mr. Ray. Woe, woe ! Talk of the 

 drama being deteriorated by the conversion of our theatres into show-houses ! 

 Stuff! Turn the whole Zoological Gardens fish and fowl, pigs, dromedaries, 

 and boa- constrictors, apes, zebras, and Colonel Sibthorpe, upon the stage, 

 and what is it compared to ' Baily Nicol Jarvie ' speaking Scotch ! A Baily 

 who will discourse you in plain Sanscrit, Japanese, or Abyssinian, is all 

 very well for those who are not fastidious, and do not insist upon the charac- 

 ters being supported in the original and unadulterated Chaldee vernacular. 

 For our own part we would in case of emergency put up with a Baily who 

 could only give us pure Coptic for we are rather fastidious on the score of its 

 purity ; or for the matter of that we might be induced to stomach a Baily who 

 would render us the part in the dialect of Thibet, Wapping, or the Ladrone 

 or Dogs' Islands. We'll even go so far as to say that sooner than have the 

 character omitted we would take it in hieroglyphics provided the prompter 

 were not too audible we need not say why he ought to be mum. But Baily 

 Nicol Jarvie talking Scotch ! Well does the Newcastle critic say, " awful 

 Scotch !" Awful indeed. This is criticism. 



Nonsense apart. After going on at a similar rate for the better part of a 

 mortal column, this intensely sublimated jackass suddenly abbreviates one of 

 his most astounding brays for the purpose of lecturing one of the unfortunate 

 objects of his remorseless donkeyism a Miss Noel on her departure from 

 her text, thus : "We would advise Miss N. to attend rather closer to her 

 author. We noticed some ungrammatical use of singular verbs to plural 

 nouns does instead of do, and so forth which sound strangely on the 

 boards of a Theatre Royal." When we came to this our love for the absurd 

 gave place to a keen desire to kick the nineteen times stultified booby as long 

 as we could stand over him. Singular verbs ! Gad, the inclination is on us 

 still ; and we hereby offer a yearly volume of the Monthly handsomely bound, 

 a bottle of Stephens's Writing Fluid, and a card of double patent Perryans 

 side spring, or under, triple-pointed or oblique slit to any person who, within 

 six months from the date hereof, shall satisfy us that he has bestowed one 

 dozen vigorous and emphatic admonitions of the nature hereinbefore specified 

 on the aforesaid woode-nheaded caitiff's antithesis of the os frontis. 



