THE THEATRE.
THE " ADELPHI" AT WESTMINSTER.
TERE,NCE WS never so successful at Rome as he is at West- minster, and if his shade has not blessed the School this week it is but an ungrateful ghost. At Rome his theatro was an outdoor shanty with no seats, and his audience was the populace On holiday. He could not abide his audience (he did not like
vulgar people), and his audience did not much care for him, with his scholarly Latin and faultless verse and clever, conceited prologues. Who was he, a liberated slave, to sneer at Plautus and sniff at the multitude ? There had once been a scone with a man in a brown bowler hat who said he could not hear, and often the whole audience had left in the middle to see if the gladiators were more amusing. But at Westminster, in the, College dormitory, with the rank and fashion of London to hear him and two scholars to call for applause at the wittiest points, things are very different. In an atmosphere of scholar. ship and social exclusiveness, Terence, who was born a slave and died a snob and was a genius all his life, finds recognition and happiness at last.
And Westminster has never done better for him than this year. Starting afresh after a six years' interval, the " Play " has recovered its old. level at a bound. The acting was excellent, the memorizing remarkable. All the old features were there— the clear Westminster enunciation, the fearsome Westminster quantities, the Prologue (very solemn this year), and the punning, topical Epilogue, which, though a modern addition, is true satura and much more Roman than the half-Greek play it follows. We know them all and love them all, and this year—just because it was this year—we were more grateful to Westminster than ever for keeping up the good Terentian tradition of fine
scholarship and broad humour. R.
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