26 OCTOBER 1878, Page 3

The manager of the Westminster Aquarium, who had advertised, to

the great dismay of London, that he would produce there in November some of the tableaux of the Oberammergau Passion Play, has been induced by the protest of Cardinal Manning and other right-minded people to withdraw the notice ; and in Tuesday's Times he takes great credit for doing so, after the immense number of applications for tickets, "far ex- ceeding the limits of the auditorium," which he had already received. But the question is with whom he had been contract- ing to represent these tableaux. A telegram from Oberammer- gau, published in yesterday's Times, signed "Lang," and dated from the office of the Biirgermeister, or chief magistrate, says simply, " Representations of the Passion Play at the Aquarium Theatre all humbug. No Oberammergauer has anything to do with it. Legal steps have been taken ; I request publica- tion." Cardinal Manning, in his letter to Monday's Times, says, 4, I am informed that a company, not the pious peasants of Ammergau, have endeavoured to give representations of the Passion Play in various parts of Germany, but have been pro- hibited by the Government ;" and it was, we may conjecture, with this company, not with the peasants of Oberammergau, that Mr. Robertson's contract had been made. But it was hardly fair to publish, by way of advertisement, the eulogies of the Press on the representation as it appeared at Ammergau, if there was no intention at all of employing in London the persons who alone elicited those eulogies.