Cht iDtatrto.
The indefatigable playgoer, who, having on Wednesday week regaled himself with Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh at Sadler's Wells, proceeded on the following Saturday to the Haymarket, and there witnessed a four-act drama of the domestic kind, entitled The Beginning and the End, must have experienced a strange transition from the etherial to the earthy- the very earthy. After looking down from a sort of air-balloon upon the tragedy of Linlithgow, and seeing the grim old story grow soft with phan- tasmagoric hues, the descent into the society of a couple of persons pro- saically engaged in perpetrating a fraud tantamount to a forgery, without a spark of the poetical or the adventurous to recommend them, must have been tremendous. The Beginning and the End was certainly a dose of the most formidable realism. When the fraud was in the course of perpe- tration, we were compelled to dwell on the minutest circumstances of the crime-to see the proper will snatched from the pillow of the dying man, and follow it down-stairs into the kitchen, till we almost felt that we were accomplices in the transaction; When the ruffian menaced assassination, we almost touched the edge of his knife ; when the sick man pined in his easy chair, we experienced the flavour of his salts and senna. On the plot it is now needless to pause ; for the audience rejected the tale of sordid crime and horror with such manifest symptoms of displeasure, that the play was withdrawn after an invalid existence of five nights. We often hear of martyrs to truth ; the author of this luck- less work may be regarded as a martyr to indiscriminate truthfulness.
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