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Salute*, produced last Monday at the Princess's, does not mark a progress in the course of spectacle as exhibited at that theatre. Hitherto all the French dramas which Mr. Charles Kean has adapted to his stage have had some features about them, beyond mere scenic magnificence, to impress them on the public mind. The Corsican Brothers, exquisitely represented, had a strange idea at its foundation, which came upon the audience as something entirely new. Ghosts and witches, fairies and sylphides, had long been familiar ; but the mysterious sympathy of the Corsican twins, and the introduction of spectral forms into the midst of the gayeties of modern Paris, allowed a new glance at what Mrs. Crowe would call the "Night-aide of Nature." Faust and ifargui•rite, the next production of the kind, had been brought down from the poetry of Wolf- gang Goethe to the prose of Michel Carre, before it reached the boards of Oxford Street ; but there was an intrinsic poetry in the subject itself, and in the principal figures, which the most matter-of-fact playwright could not wholly extinguish ; and the concluding group of Margaret supported by angels was such a felicitous tableau, that It caused even those who doubted 'whether such subjects were proper for the stage to gasp with admiration. Then came The Courier of Lyons, far More prosaic than the other two pieces, and having a strong affinity to the old murderous melodramas of bygone days, but still remarkable from the peculiar circumstanees of the crime on which its plot depended. The bodily likeness of the guilty to the innocent man answered in some way to the spiritual connexion between the Corsican Brothers; and the resemblance was still further carried out by the circumstance that hetli the characters were played-by the same actor.
In contradistinction to -all its predecessors, Schansyl, which is adapted from a Porte St. Malkin drama, is remarkable for its magnificence only The manager has lavished all extraneous ornaments upon it to wake of it an imposing spectacle' and we feel that so far he has succeeded: but still it is a mere spectacle, without an idea or a notion or a fancy glan- cing through its gorgeous details ; and therefore, while it dazzles the eye, it acts but little upon the imagination. Bellamy], a strange semi. mythical figure of the present day, lately rendered popular by the break- ing-out of the war with Russia, lends the magic of his nabie to a series of incidents with which historically he has nothing to do, and which have not much to do with each other ; sharp battles are fought, and beautiful dances are danced before some very beautiful scenery; and thus there is the double advantage of popular allusions and splendid execution. But as George Buchanan with all his exertions could make of King James nothing but a pedant, so is all the taste, all the care, and all the expendi- ture of Mr. Kean, incapable of making of Schamyl anything but a very cumbersome, ill-connected melodrama. It is satisfactory to reflect thit the mistake was committed in France.
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