14 OCTOBER 1854, Page 11

t*trro.

Mr. Douglas Jerrold's play of A Heart of Gold, with which the Prin- cess's Theatre opened on Monday last, looks exactly like the work of a very young dramatist of extraordinary brilliancy. The characters are all such as might be learned from books ; the moral purpose grows the more hazy the more you seem to approach it; the plot is constructed without apparent regard to interest; and comic personages are thrown in by way of relief, after the conventional mode of the most oldfaahioned melodramas. We may imagine a young poet who has seen a play or two, and read a number of quaint essayists, throwing off a piece like this ; using in the crudest manner the most artificial stage forms, and satisfied with his work if the dialogue corresponds to his ideal.

The story of a man who, thinking he is about to die, makes a gift of all his property to a youth, who refuses to restore it when his benefactor has recovered, and by this baseness nearly loses the affections of his mistress, is of itself slight, but it might be told with more point and purpose. The more obvious moral would be, that ill-gotten wealth never thrives,—a theme very cleverly worked out at the Paris Varietes about six months ago with the title L' Argent du _Diable : but sentiments are put into the mouths of the personages which would seem to indicate that the pos- session of wealth is in itself an evil, and that it is better to be without a thousand pounds than to have them. This is exactly the sort of view which would be taken up by a young enthusiastic student, who, brimful of the commonplaces of the old Latin poets against " opes irritamenta malorum," would vent his poetical spleen against the prosaic world around him. The whole work expresses sentiments in themselves noble —hatred of the sordid, admiration of the disinterested—everything, in short, but experience. AS a play, no work could be much less satisfactory than A Heart of Gold; though there are flashes of wit from time to time, which rouse an audience into applause even in the dullest portions of the story. Now the author revels in a bright poetical description ; now he decks out a thought with the most fanciful illustrations ; now he fires off a repartee, recondite enough to make the hearer reflect for a moment, poignant enough to make him burst into an unconstrained laugh as soon as the re- flection is finished. Had the piece been the production of such a young beginner as we have imagined above, we should have hailed an accession of new talent to the stage, and considered the defects as the conse- quences of insufficient practice. But as it is the work of a veteran, who has proved one of the brightest ornaments of the modern stage, we can only express our disappointment, and let, the affair drop. Better acting might indeed have given more effect to the performance,—for certainly, with the exception of Miss Heath, who played the heroine, the histrionic talent was of a middling kind ; but it could not have glossed over the intrinsic feebleness of the Diem A little comedy, called Living to Fast, in which a lesson against ex- ceeding one's income was conveyed by the embarrassment of a reckless married pair, was played on the same evening. Thus the farce and the drama taught somewhat different doctrines. "Don't throw money away," says the farce ; "Don't pick it up," says the drama.