1826.] 
been a very extraordinary and yery unex- 
pected improvement. 
The singers are in general familiar to the 
public. ~ Miss Paton has an arduous part, 
if straining her fine voice, and distorting 
her really pretty features, is to be the cri- 
terion of difficulty. No singer certainly 
seems'to make a more willing sacrifice of 
beauty to song—for Miss Paton is a hand- 
some personage, however seldom it can be 
suspeeted by those who see her only in full 
brayura:' She accomplishes a cadence with 
more dislocation of the loves and graces 
than any female on record; but she will 
amend this as she grows older, and finds 
reason to be more chary of her charms. 
" Sapio is the’ same thing he was two years 
ago, when he constituted the united Apollo 
and Adonis of Drury-Lane, except that 
his yoice quavers more and that his figure 
is more stooped. We cannot believe that 
both are from increased age. His time 
will come like that of other men, even if 
he were ten times a better singer and a 
more ‘* enchanting man ”’ than he will ever 
be. But until that hand, which neither 
actor nor manager can resist, which is 
bowing the sinews of Young, and infuriating 
the irascibility of Macready, has finally 
erushed him into decrepitude, Mr. Sapio 
ought at least to try to stand straight, 
move with the beldness of a man not yet 
much used to crutches, and make the ex- 
periment of pitching his voice to tones not 
altogether emulous of the unhappy dis- 
tinctions of Signior Velluti. 
As for the rest: Mr. Thorne plays the 
fool, and has the advantage of perfectly 
looking the part. However, its humour is 
sO grave, and its frolic so much the oppo- 
site of sportive, that we think him su- 
premely fortunate in getting over his task 
without any worse consequences to his 
feelings than the box ‘on the ear which 
Miss Goward—who seems created for such 
purposes and for no other—gives him with 
such palpable good-will. 
‘The Death-Fetch has been played some 
nights at the Lyceum. It is one of those 
German horror stories, from which com- 
mon-sense and natural feeling equally turn 
away. ‘Two lovers see alternately each 
others’ ghosts; thus apparitions are equi- 
yalent to a sentence of death, and those 
two doomed and loving people waste away 
day by day, looking at what each shall be 
before the play is over. » They at last re- 
tire to the Hartz Mountains (the seat of 
all the romance of Germany since Goéthe 
has made romance and mountains fashiona- 
‘Dle) where they see each other, in reality 
‘and in vision, until they are sufficiently far 
‘gone to die; then Miss Kelly falls into Mr. 
Archer’s arms and they both drop dead. 
We cannot comprehend the kind of taste 
which may be indulged by seeing such pre- 
‘posterous things. é an) Y ‘1190 
- Of poetical justice it would be, of course, 
‘burlesque to talk in these little, unnatural 
7 
Monthly Theatrical Review. 
325 
fabrications ; but the stage ought to bea 
source of either high sensibility or easy 
merriment—stories of goblins can be nei- 
ther. Moral is out..of the. question, and 
meaning is out of the. question too., The 
stage should not be. made, a,jnursery of 
nonsense that would revolt, any . other 
nursery, nor a chapel of ease: to the char- 
nel-house. ‘The Death-Fetch is laid, and 
we hope laid in perfect, asin deserved, ob- 
livion. 
“ Lying made Easy,” no bad successor 
to the hobgoblinism, is a little farce in 
which Wrench plays the knave with. his 
usual adroitness. The plot is simple to the 
full amount of being silly. A young man 
is in love with a niece of the lady of the 
mansion. The valet persuades the husband 
that this lover, his own nephew, is attach- 
ed to the wife! Another stratagem. per- 
suades the wife that her husband is attached 
to the niece. Jealousy rages in the house, 
until the valet recommends, as the only 
sedative, that a fortune should be giyen to 
the young people as a bribe to marry each 
other, and thus get rid of both. The wife 
and husband snatch at this lucky concep- 
tion with the headlong simplicity appropri- 
ated to such matters on the stage, and the 
lovers are made happy, if that dubious 
indulgence, marriage, can make them so. 
Wrench is pleasant and lively. in every 
thing, and ought to, have been long since 
transerred to the winter theatres. The 
race of the lighter men of fashion, the 
“ young fellows about town,” as they used 
to be termed in our comedies, has passed 
away in a singular degree: Covent Garden 
has one representative of them, and .but 
one—Jones, a delightful actor in his style, 
dexterous, spirited, and brilliant; never 
negligent, never vulgar, never,,common- 
place; always throwing his best powers into 
his part, and perhaps, on the whole, the 
preserver of a greater number of perform- 
ances—which without him must have pe- 
rished at once—than any actor of his time. 
But of this style Drury-Lane affords. no 
specimen whatever. Elliston is gone—and 
whether he lingers in London, attending 
the police-offices in the day, and figuring 
at' Vauxhall in the night—whether Mr. 
Poole is to haye the honour of mulcting 
him a second time in his last farthing, or he 
is to go forth on the general plunder of, the 
transatlantic Thalia, he will never be the 
“ glass of fashion and the mould. of form,’’ 
on this side of the earth again. 
» The taking of Drury-Lane by the Ame- 
rican manager will produce some change of 
affairs, and so far all is well. He isa 
lively locomotive person, and obviously 
thinks but little about a voyage across the 
ocean, He takes to the Atlantic like one 
of its own leviathan, and refreshes New 
York with English of the latest pronuncia- 
tion of any man alive. . He is a sort of ge-. 
neral trader in, human. stock, and has now 
grown into a monopoly of the rejected, 
